UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines Phone services for the UK tax authority continue to deteriorate, and the digital systems that were supposed to take up the slack aren't good enough. Parliamentary watchdog the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said that in the last financial year, 62.7 percent of callers to His Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) waited more than …
Wow, just think - if the tax system wasn't so insanely, unfathomably complex and utterly hellish, this whole game would be a lot easier. HMRC could run with far fewer people, a far smaller helpline, time and money saved, and happiness all round! But na, obviously that will never happen....
I had reason to try and get the UK tax code, which does not seem to be online as a download, but them, maybe i missed it.
What i did find is a description and a picture from the following :
https://www.annlhumphrey.com/tax-policy/why-we-need-to-simplify-our-tax-code/
The Hong Kong tax code is less than 150k words long.
The UK tax code is 10million words.
The entire works of Shakespeare is 885k words.
Those tax loopholes need to be well obfuscated.
"The Hong Kong tax code is less than 150k words long......The UK tax code is 10million words."
I think you'll find that 10m number is derived from the various volumes of Tolley's Tax Guide, which includes a lot of explanation, footnotes, necessary duplication of content, and where relevant expired legislation. Whilst ultimately thwarted in their purpose, the Office of Tax Simplification had a look at this topic, and estimated that there was about 6,100 pages of current tax legislation (a web search will find this analysis on gov.uk). Based on the word/page count of the 2022 Finance Act that gives me around 430 words per page, which suggests that as enacted at 2016 the UK tax code was around 2.5 million words, although it will have increased since OTS did those estimates in 2016. It's also worth noting that international comparisons on tax complexity put the UK in the same bracket as France, Germany, Japan or Australia, and less complex than Italy, the US or Canada.
I also wondered how long the HK tax code was - the HK Inland Revenue Department have their own web site, and their published "Interpretation and Practice Notes" total 2,551 pages which I estimate at 283 words a page and extrapolate to 723,000 words. Vastly simpler than the UK, but not the 150:10m that is suggested.
So, your source IMHO is not completely fair in the figures used, and the HK code is notably longer and more complex than claimed, the UK code is shorter than claimed and comparable to our main trading partners. None of which detracts from your assertion that UK tax law is unreasonably and unnecessarily complicated. I'd agree that it should be radically simplified so that it is shorter, fairer, less prone to loopholes and tax avoidance, and doesn't need 18,000+ pages of explanation across seven volumes costing about a thousand quid.
I haven't really looked at the UK tax in detail, part from the gov.uk website, which really is spartan with information. The Tolleys is available for £155.00 as a download, and not really able to find a guide that is free or cheap - so do you have any suggestions ? Thanks.
I would have thought that the entire UK tax code would be available as a download from the gov.uk website.
It is all there, but they don't make it easy to find.
A good starting point is to go to the HMRC guidance and regulation page, and search for "manual".
https://www.gov.uk/search/guidance-and-regulation?parent=hm-revenue-customs&keywords=manual&organisations%5B%5D=hm-revenue-customs&order=relevance
Indeed. I'm still awaiting an urgent return call from June... 2021. They're much faster when I sic my accountant on them, and the website was, um, strange, but I managed to pay some excess tax. But I haven't yet received any notification that they're changing next year's tax code in consequence...
Oddly enough, replacing my expiring passport as a foreign residence was a piece of cake: posted it about a fortnight ago and the replacement back this morning. The website is single-minded, asks straight-forward questions, one to a page and with mostly yes/no answers... designed for idiots and so suited to me.
Or you may sign in to your account, to start your next year's return, only to find that they've retrospectively (and incorrectly) decided you owe more tax, and for good measure, because that takes you over the threshold you now also have to pay the following years estimate on account. Only they didn't bother actually telling me any of this, and by the time I see it, they've already started adding penalties and interest.
And when you query this, you don't get a reply. So you complain about the lack of reply - only to find they did reply, but sent it to a different address and I never received it. Turns out that my employer asked them to change my address and they did so - without asking or even telling me - so that's yet another complaint to add to the first which they still haven't properly addressed (skimmed my letter, saw key words, assumed something different to what I wrote, and so replied with a load of irrelevant rubbish).
And always send by Recorded Delivery Signed For - and check. I've now had two letters to HMRC apparently not delivered. No idea if it's genuinely not been delivered, or they just missed scanning the barcode. Either way, it's be more compo from Royal Mail !
CEST is a window dressing. It has zero relevance to the status the client choses under Chapter 10.
If the client doesn't want to come under HMRC scrutiny, they ensure contracts fall in scope regardless of the actual circumstances.
You can use CEST tool all you want and if it says the engagement is out of scope, the client can just end the contract and find a different supplier.
As others have noted, part of the problem is down to how many people now HAVE to avail themselves of the HMRC support options due to how complicated our taxes are and how some allowances haven't kept up with the times, thus pulling more people into the tax system for the first time, or pulling them across from one part of it to another (e.g. anyone, like me, who now has to endure self assessment because of things like the higher income child benefit charge).
Another part of the problem is simply how incompetent they are, and how many different answers you'll then get from different people when you try to figure out why their incompetence has meant they're claiming you've done something wrong and deserve to be penalised for it. Having gone through that all last year, ending up with a resolution in my favour (all penalty payments refunded, and an assurance that the underlying problem with my tax account, which caused them to fail to take my payments as intended, had been resolved), I now find myself in the exact same position again this year... Once again, I know I've not done anything wrong, I know the problem is down to them messing things up yet again, and I very much suspect it'll take the best part of the coming year to get it all resolved in my favour again.
The time is long overdue for the entire tax system in this country - the tax rules themselves as well as the administration responsible for handling them all - to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.
Don't forget that HMRC tend to ignore case law when it suits them and what you gonna do? Take them to court?
Reality is that they are out of control and need deep reform. Unfortunately doesn't seem like the geniuses we are going to elect for the next government are capable of that.
Due to the death of my son's mother he's become a pensioner but has been charged income tax though his pension is no where near the tax free threshold. At 5 years old he's not got the reading ability to tackle the HMRC website or phone line so its up to me to take it on. If only he was Deep Thought.
HMRC's online and telephone system is all set up on the basis of NI numbers that only get issued until someone's just about to turn 16 so accessing any information is torturous involving multiple phone calls. It's driven me slightly batty sitting on the phone trying to sort out his tax and being told to use the online web services by the hold message and then to get cut off. It's taken me a rather lengthy email exchange to discover that under 18s can't use the online service that I hoped my save my sanity..
The chat bot does not seem capable enough to deal with the simple question of:
"My 5 year old son has paid too much income tax on his pension."
And comes back with.
"You must send a tax return if, in the last tax year (6 April to 5 April), you were:..." It really doesn't understand what it's been asked.
I was told I had to use the digital service. I only managed to set up an account, squeezing through the endless security because I had a 2 year old paper bank statement with a tax payment on it. Without that, I couldn't have proved that I was me. My bank recently stopped sending me paper bank statements, so hopefully they won't do a password reset.
When I had a query, I gave up on the phone and sent them a letter. It worked, but it takes about 3 months. Don't leave these things to the last minute or the bailiffs will get to you before your problem is resolved. To be fair, it's not just them. My bank shut my local branch. Shortly after I was on the phone to their security department for 90 mins without getting a response.
The online tax service is actually quite good if your tax affairs are simple. But as with all digital services, if there is any issue at all, you are completely screwed.
And not only are you screwed, but their attitude is that they are right, you are wrong, you will pay them everything and anything they think you ought to owe - and it's up to you to prove otherwise and you'll get the money back, sometime, when/if they feel like giving it to you - with a pittance of interest that nowhere near covers the lost opportunity costs from not having that money.
Over the last couple of months my business partner and I have needed to call HMRC about half a dozen time, mostly because they have messed things up with VAT and tax codes and company registrations. On several occasions we have each had to wait on hold for over an hour, and reckon the quickest response was around 50 minutes. All the time you are bombarded by claptrap messages about using their website and going online. Does it not occur to these f*ckwits, that if I could do it online I would not be wasted an hour of my precious time on hold, waiting for them to answer. I still need to find out how I can bill them £100 p/h for the lost time and income I have had to lose, just to get them to fix their own mistake......
The Tax Man and the Excise Man used to be the two most feared instruments of State in the land. Since they merged, they have become the biggest laughing-stock.
Evading or avoiding their clutches, to choice, has never been easier. Meanwhile, the law-abiding citizens who pursue their tax responsibilities with all due diligence are treated as lambs to the slaughter.
Don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if your tax record is now an Excel file on a cloudy SharePoint, with a billion-pound Oracle database to point at the wrong ones, and an AI assistant to help our erstwhile terrorisers tear their hair out. Poor sods, rolled over by Big IT just like the rest of us.
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