Do you find it difficult enough to fill in your tax form to meet the revenue’s deadline of Jan 31?
Perhaps you don’t sympathise with tax officials anyway but you would want an efficient, accessible service – both on line and if necessary, in person.
A damning report from Whitehall’s watchdog body, the National Audit Office, reveals you are going to be very lucky to get either in future.
For the government latest economies are going to mean ” a slash and burn ” strategy for the way the Inland Revenue collects your money – with a prime aim of saving money rather than providing a service.
At the moment they are 170 local tax offices – whose buildings are already outsourced to a tax haven based company which grabbed them in 2001 without government ministers even realising who the “tax avoiding ” owners were..
There are all going to close and be replaced with 13 super regional offices. Some 38,000 officials are going to have move job location and HMRC ( Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) admits that 5000 of them -probably the most experienced – will quit their jobs rather than put up with the hassle.
Vast swathes of the UK are going to be without any local tax offices. In Scotland there will be just two – Edinburgh and Glasgow – because the cost cutters believe Dundee and Aberdeen are too small fry cities to need tax offices. Staff will be expected to commute daily by rail or car from those two cities to Edinburgh.
The whole of London and the South East will have one tax office in Croydon – with the South Coast staff expected to commute daily by that wonderful reliable (ha,ha) and strike prone Southern railway – boosting its profits and making sure trains are even more crowded.
East Anglia will have no tax offices at all – with staff from Norwich expected to commute to Canary Wharf everyday and then possibly change trains for Croydon.
The West Country will also be denuded with one new regional tax office left in Bristol – so anyone now working in Cornwall’s tax office in Redruth would face, according to the NAO, a 174 mile commute every day.
Wales, the Midlands and the North West are not so badly affected – as new regional offices will be nearer old ones.
The government predicts that it will make savings of £212m by 2025-26 with all this upheaval but this is a staggering £287m LOWER than predicted two years ago when it thought it would save £499m. So much for effective Whitehall predictions.
Nor is the NAO impressed with its present planning. The report says.
“HMRC has signed the contract for its first regional centre in Croydon, but faces a demanding timetable to occupy the site as it plans in 2017. HMRC’s move to regional centres will require good coordination across HMRC to ensure that everyone involved in the moves understands what is expected of them. It must therefore clarify what changes in working practices are necessary to support digital services and its future compliance model, and coordinate its design of regional centres to achieve these outcomes.”
HMRC has also signed 25 year non negotiable leases (with no break points). on buildings for both the Croydon and Bristol offices.
I am sure taxpayers will be delighted to know that if the scheme goes belly up HMRC has put itself in a situation where it can be blackmailed by property developers to pay the full whack whether it uses the building or not.
You can read the full report here and I have written a piece for Tribune.
Mind you I may have missed a trick. With Philip Hammond, the Chancellor announcing Britain could become a tax haven if the EU does not agree to our Brexit terms, we may not need any tax offices by then as nobody will pay any tax. So it could be a clever piece of advance planning. Pity we won’t have any public services either as tax havens don’t provide them.
Posted by jeffrey davies [86.17.83.77] on 19 January 2017
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its here jail for the poor
High court rules magistrates failed to assess unemployed mother’s financial means or consider her child’s position.
A single mother who was sent to prison by magistrates for 81 days because she was unable to pay her council tax bill was unlawfully jailed, the high court has ruled.
The decision by Mr Justice Lewis found that the lower court had failed to assess Melanie Woolcock’s financial means and had no basis for concluding her failure to pay was due to ‘culpable neglect’.
Woolcock of Porthcawl, Wales, had been unemployed after working part-time in a sports shop. She had told her solicitor that she struggled to make household payments and prioritised her rent, gas, electricity and food bills.
Her appeal was taken up by law firm Ahmed Rahman Carr and solicitor Sam Genen of the London-based Centre for Criminal Appeals (CCA), who has been investigating similar cases.
Around 100 people are imprisoned each year in England and Wales for failure to pay council tax debts. Many decisions, according to Genen, involve desperately poor people falling into severe debt and are subsequently overturned on appeal.
Woolcock was supporting her 17-year-old son when she fell behind on her council tax payments. She was arrested on 8 August 2016 despite making a payment towards her outstanding debt days earlier.
She served 40 days of her prison term before the CCA challenged her detention and persuaded the high court to release her.
In a judgment released on Wednesday, Mr Justice Lewis concluded: “The magistrates’ court failed to carry out a proper and adequate means inquiry as required … and were not in a position to determine if non-payment was the result of culpable neglect nor whether the orders were appropriate mechanisms for enforcing the debt.”
He also observed that there was little evidence that the child’s position had been considered by the court.
The CCA is preparing to intervene in a judicial review of the legality of the current system by which people are committed to prison for non-payment of council tax.
Helen Ball, a researcher at the CCA, has identified and reviewed 145 cases since 1980 where a person’s committal to prison for non-payment of dues such as fines, council tax and the community charge has been ruled unlawful in the high court.
She said: “Magistrates have often incorrectly concluded that there’s been culpable neglect or a wilful refusal to pay. Moreover, magistrates have regularly failed to properly assess a person’s ability to pay and to consider reasonable alternatives to prison.”
Posted by jeffrey davies [86.17.83.77] on 19 January 2017
