Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits Brits’ favourite government department, Her Majesty’s Revenues & Customs, has released a listicle of the most bizarre excuses people have given for missing the Self Assessment tax returns deadline, along with the weirdest biz expense claims The UK’s tax collector isn't compiling the oddest top 10 from the last decade simply to …
I once went to a birthday celebration in Greek Street. Along the guests was someone who had just returned from Hong Kong. He was delegated to order.
He told us the conversation with the waiter went like this:
-Please take this away and bring me the Cantonese menu.
-English people do not like Chinese food.
-These English people do like Chinese food.
-English people would not understand the menu.
-Have you noticed I am speaking to you in Cantonese?
The dinner lasted three hours and was superb.
When I was working in Germany many years ago, I was staying at a small hotel close to the chemical plant. I was intrigued to see "Toast" on the menu on the first evening, at a fairly hefty price for what should have been a simple piece of cooked bread. I asked for details, and was told that it was a house speciality, consisting of a round of toasted bread, surmounted by a steak, then a poached egg, and topped off with either a pepper or Hollandaise sauce, with a side salad. I ordered it, and it was delicious. I spent five nights in that hotel, and guess what I had for dinner every evening.
"we're only having pasta this evening"
ONLY? Then you're not doing it right. I'll send you an invite for the next time my wife cooks spaghetti or pasta con broccoli. The wisest move of my life was marrying in to an Italian family with unflexible standards on cooking.
Don't worry. I had a 'todoo' with them this week.
Had a legitimate £2500 Bill for 2018/19 so I paid it. I also had a 'pre-demand for 2019/20' which I declared not required [what's the actual wording??] Due to a change of circumstances.
Three weeks after paying and getting the confirmation of the change to 19/20 - I get a statement requesting £4500 for 18/19 and prepayment for 19/20.....
Cue a 30 minute wait in the queue to tell them about long walks off short planks....
Apparently the folks at Vulture Central had already fucked off down to t'pub for the Friday night bevvies, before adding the link.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/self-assessment-returns-unbelievable-excuses-and-dubious-expenses
I'd do the same but I'm stuck in the States. Distinct lack of good pubs here.
"Distinct lack of good pubs here."
There's a good one in Vegas. Crown and Anchor
Pretty decent steak and mushroom pie and Guinness on tap. Football on the telly and the girls aren't hard on the eyes. If they just had fruit of the forest pie with custard for afters.......
I got a letter in the post (see attachment) expressing their condolences on my having died, then demanding my next of kin pay my remaining bills.
Since I don't have any next of kin & I was supposedly dead, I sent them a reply to stick their bill where the sun didn't shine.
We went back & forth for the better part of the year with them insisting I was dead, me retorting that I felt perfectly fine.
Cue the Monty Python skit with me wanting to go for walkies & some nasty bloke giving me a club to the head.
I woke up in an old folks home being force fed dried frog pills.
*Sigh*
I'll fill out my tax forms just as soon as my doctors rescind my death papers.
(As silly as this sounds, it actually happened to my biological father one year - someone at the hospital entered his SocialSecurityNumber by mistake & it took bloody forever to get *their* fuckup corrected & my father's non-dead status reestablished.)
Year before last I found a bug in the property section of the online form. Called up. "Let me try it" she said. Pause. Oh dear, you're right."Good" I said "is there a bug report bounty?" Cue helpless giggling from tax lady.
On a more serious note, I have by my desk the case files for a friend, recently deceased, who was the only private person ever to win the right to take HMRC to the European Court of Human Rights.You *can* beat the man.
HMRC's IT. Over the years they think I've filed 3 times late. They won't take me to court to get their money though because they daren't put their systems under the slightest scrutiny. One year I got a £73 refund then a non-filing complaint. How could they give me a refund if they hadn't had the return? You tell me. Every year my tax return reiterates these things but they take no notice. So HMRC need to get their own house on order before moaning at other people.
I have to ring up HMRC every year to give them numbers for my dividends, savings interest, and Gift Aid donations. Otherwise my PAYE is straightforward.
Last year - after a few months delay - they offered me a large refund. I had to ring them again to point out they had failed to transcribe the significant interest on one of my savings accounts
Online filing. Yes, the system that refuses to accept such esoteric characters as £ - & % / : and newline. Meaning you have to go in circles to write things such as: the income during 2017-18 from Alice & Bob Ltd was split 50%/25%/25% between: Fred, Jim and Sheila.
Fortunately I've been PAYE for many years, so not had to deal with HMRC for years.
However, when I was much younger, they sent me a letter saying they weren't quite sure if I'd paid the correct amount of tax, and would I please send them my pay slips from the last three years.
Now, I was just a kid then, so all the jobs I'd had up to that point were in the local pub, working for minimum wage, and often cash in hand. I had about six months of (mostly) legit pay stubs at that point, but I decided to to take the easy route, and just ignored the letter.
Six month later I got another letter. It said that they'd checked the records and had actually paid too much tax, and included a cheque for £500.
I have no idea where they got that idea from, but I kept quiet and have been fortunate enough to avoid their attention ever since.
"Fortunately I've been PAYE for many years, so not had to deal with HMRC for years."
Don't be lulled into a sense of false security.
I've been PAYE my entire 35 year working life, that didn't stop them sending me a bill for a £900 underpayment. Followed by a fine of £45 for late payment - even though they sent me a letter stating they would be TAKING the £900 via a tax code change the next year!
I live in Canada; I work in the US.
I recently received a VERY aggressive letter from the US IRS that I hadn't filed my tax return... which I had. On calling the IRS, the lady said "Yes, it's posted but not reviewed. They didn't check on the system", or words to that effect.
Anonymous because I've had many, many issues with the IRS, and it's not wise to pi$$ them off.
No it's not. In Switzerland, I took our paperwork down to the tax office to ask if I understood the guidance correct. I was also told we could submit a supporting document in Portuguese, the boss knew Spanish,took a look and understood.
People we knew were even reminded to declare expenses.
Apparently it varies by municipality, but to us it came across as a matter of professional pride that we should pay the correct amount of tax
Even Brits aren't necessarily utterly useless with foreign documents ...
When I returned to Blighty from several years in Italy, there was one piece of bureaucracy that worked. I was able to get car insurance with maximum no-claims bonus based on a letter from my Italian insurer.
Other matters were much more problematic, but methinks we're already off-topic here.
I'm in Norway, and so far I've checked the pre-filled form online, and will probably just sign off on that.
If I don't bother to check or sign it one year, the system will automatically accept it on the last day.
And yes, I get a bit of money back most years.
So true. I actually asked my employer to pay a little extra each month to pretty much guarantee a refund every year. Never yet found anything inaccurate on my Norwegian tax return, even down to the balance on my store loyalty cards. I always buy something expensive on a credit card in December that work will pay for, just for that little dexra reduction.
It's like they're trying to show us they're human in the HMRC by having a sense of humour.
Hasn't worked mind. The heartless gits*.
*still bitter over one year (along time ago and paying allot less than now)I changed jobs, all using PAYE and got demands for missed payments. Cue sending copies of payslips proving this wasn't the case and got a letter back... That agreed I had paid the required tax. But they still wanted to take the tax anyway because they'd said they would.
I got a letter reporting that I had failed to submit PAYE returns for a company of mine.
For the year after the (non-trading) company had been closed, struck off, HMRC informed, etc.
So we have a company with no income, no employees and doesn't exist, being threatened with fines/etc for not supplying information that couldn't exist in the first place!
Got put on an emergency tax code by one employer ... a year later a new member of the finance team noticed and let me know. I contact HMRC for a refund on the overpaid tax. The cheque was "in the post" three times but never arrived. In the end I gave up. Kafkaesque to the max.
"[...] surely no excuse not to complete
People may be dependent on numbers from other sources. I have to chase a charity to give me a total for the year's total Gift Aid value of my donated goods and coin boxes. It makes a significant reduction to my higher tax bill.
HMRC say they will reclaim Gift Aid from the donor if not enough income tax had been paid to offset it. That implies they correlate a charity's claims with the donor's tax records. It would save work if they used that input automatically when calculating the donor's tax. The same applies to dividends and savings interest - numbers apparently they no longer expect the big companies to send to them.
Anyone else wish you could start a tax return during its own tax year? So you could enter things as you go along, especially those things that don't get summarised for tax purposes at year-end (like PAYE).
Last few years I've had a one-off taxable payment around the end of January (about £200-ish). By April, when I can start filling the tax return, the only record I have of it is the payment into my bank account. This year I don't even have that, as I've closed the bank account in question.
"HMRC say they will reclaim Gift Aid from the donor if not enough income tax had been paid to offset it. That implies they correlate a charity's claims with the donor's tax records .... "
It does, but they don't. All the charity collects for a Gift Aid claimant is their name, address and the date of their declaration. No DoB, NI number or wany other easy way of linking to a tax account. In fact I've long thought that HMRC seem to have no interest in policing the scheme.
They will indeed collect it: it all resolves in the tax return, where you declare charitable donations and gift aid. Makes no difference to basic rate taxpayers ('cos that's already the assumption when the charity 'reclaimed' it), but if you pay higher rate you get the excess refunded, and if you pay zero rate, you have to make up the amount reclaimed by the charity.
Important to watch if - like me - your annual taxable income varies between all those bands. No tax to offset, no gift aid.
If you don't fill a tax return, then none of the above applies, and I expect you're probably right about them then ignoring it.
"My machine got infected with ransomware and both backup drives, the CDRW and HDD got encrypted"
Actually have seen this, about the only advice given was "Which has the higher cost?" Turns out paying the ransom unfortunately was cheaper at least for PowerWare at $500 versus $$$$$$$$ for not completing on time: the file needs to be readable so submitting an encrypted return won't help.
Lesson learned, have backups on something which can't be overwritten. M-Disc works but only if you close the session.
Paper backups also work.
The Passport Office in London probably has a list of reasons given for issuing passports to callers in a hurry. In the 1970s the company wanted me to go to an overseas office to sort an urgent problem. Needing a passport I joined the queue. The excuse of the couple in front of me was that they were due to travel - and their child had dropped the family passport in a bowl of syrup on the breakfast table. The pages of the very stick mess were carefully prised apart to verify its validity.
That guard dog story is one I heard many years ago, as a young grad. Told by a friend who went into beancounting the same time as I took my first hacking job. They were auditing someone who tried to claim dog food against tax. They (the auditors) had met the dogs in question in circumstances where a guard dog should've seen them off, and the dogs had been entirely friendly. They disallowed that claim.
As for the mother-in-law joke, that of course comes from an era of much more acute housing shortage than today's "crisis", when young couples would live for years on the mother-in-law's couch before they could get their own place. Naturally the mother-in-law walking in and out cramped a chap's style, and the classic joke was a safety-valve for pent up frustration.
What's this year's excuse? I just had a minor hiatus, where I'd lost all record of a modest (£200-ish) taxable commission-rebate payment. A simple 'phone call got me a copy of that from the rebater.
Naturally the mother-in-law walking in and out cramped a chap's style, [...]"
When my parents married in 1938 they lived with the maternal parents for a while. My father and mother were forbidden to be upstairs together during the day time.
Contrast that with the generation born since about 1990 - where kids bring their current love interest home for the night with their parents' acceptance. Not that the latter always approve of the current chosen one.
Contrast that with the generation born since about 1990 - where kids bring their current love interest home for the night with their parents' acceptance. Not that the latter always approve of the current chosen one.
I, and my siblings, were all born in the 1970s. I don't think my parents were particularly liberal at the time (one was a hospital consultant, the other a GP, and I doubt either has ever voted anything other than tory). The same sort of thing was perfectly acceptible to them. I suspect your parents were just very socially conservative and/or religious.
"The same sort of thing was perfectly acceptible to them. I suspect your parents were just very socially conservative and/or religious."
My parents were typical of their UK generation born before the 1920s.. The watershed was in the fabled 1960s when children born in the 1930s or war-time still conformed to the rigid conventions of courtship and marriage.
The post-war 1940s Baby-boomers like myself came of age on a cusp. Many of my school pals still married early, had children immediately, and lived near to their parents. However - it was a time of social mobility and many of us left our home towns for our careers. While not quite the mythical Swinging Sixties in most of the UK - there was a trend towards a more permissive attitude to relationships that became more evident in the 1970s.
It was still a long rocky road to the current social attitudes. The pendulum can still swing back as populist politicians court the conservative and religious groups who still seek to impose their restrictive dogma on civil law.
In case there's people reading his who are from third world countries* with absurdly inefficient tax systems designed to kick up maximum fuss every year given the headline could be slightly confusing: the vast majority of people in the UK don't file tax returns.. It's about 12 million before you ask - which surprised me it's that high, suspect a good chunk of that is why IR35 exists..
* Like the US..
Once had some hassle because I was out of work for a while and was told by someone at HMRC to put unemployment benefit down as "JSA"
Years later, got a 4 figure bill which was actually higher than my monthly income and a "must be paid within 14 days" note, did the calculations and it would have put me in effective bankruptcy for nearly a year.
After seriously looking into emigrating to Russia and actually getting as far as obtaining the forms, I eventually found out that they had put it down as a UK benefit by mistake, and it wasn't necessary to put it on the form in the first place.
Orwell was an optimist.
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