26 January 2017

The Tax System

A guide.

By Chin Chin

It is tax return time of year again and the nation disappears under a cloud of receipts and invoices as everyone participates in the general search for missing pieces of paper.  There is also the excitement of trying to get the information into the HM Revenue & Customs computer system.  That is always entertaining, but this year they have introduced a new refinement to keep us all amused or, as they would put it, to safeguard confidentiality.

In the past you could get onto their website with a number and password.  They were both of extraordinary length, so those who follow the golden rule of never writing passwords down must have devoted hours to learning them by rote.  Perhaps they recite them every evening with their prayers.  Still, you cannot be too careful.  What a nightmare if the Russians broke into the system and paid the tax on your account.

The new twist takes the form of a text message.  Once you have put in the codes, HMRC sends a text message to your phone with a special number.  Without that number you cannot get into the system.

I suppose that there are people who always have their telephone with them when they are using their computers.  Unfortunately I am not one of them so, quite apart from finding the information, I have to try and find the telephone which I was using when the system was set up because that is the one to which the message will be sent.  For those who lose their phones or change their number, it must be little short of a nightmare.  There must be a better way.  Perhaps they should replace the whole security system with voice recognition, although, come to think about it, that would have its drawbacks too.

In most sane households there is only one person capable of handling the HMRC website, so they have to fill in everyone’s return.  Typically they will wear spectacles and be beetle-browed.  In Snow White’s household the name would be “Grumpy.  At the start of tax return day, Grumpy sits down with a fistful of codes, receipts, mobile phones and a large bottle of whisky.  A few hour later the work is all done and the whisky bottle is empty.  Imagine if we had voice recognition:

“Ethelfleda!” Grumpy would call, assuming he was in the county of the East Saxons, now commonly known as Essex.  “Drat the girl, I need to get into her return.”

“She’s on the phone to Wayne.”

“Which Wayne?  Everyone is called that, here.  Is it the one with the factory or the poor one?”

“I don’t know but she seems to know him well.  Began the conversation: “Hey,Wayne.””

“Ah, good, the one with the art collection, by the sound of it.  Tell her she needs to say something to the computer. It doesn’t matter what it is.”  Ethelfleda enters the room tottering on her high heels, still talking with animation into her mobile, and leans down over the computer’s microphone before walking away.

“No, it doesn’t seem to have worked.  I think you must have recorded the original message in your smart voice not the slutty one.  Or maybe it didn’t recognise one or two of the words.  Have another go.  Tell the people at HMRC what you think of them.”

“**!!!#!**.  No,no, not you Wayne.  Damn, the bastard’s rung off.  I’ll have to try the one with the factory.”

Look at it all from the Chancellor’s point of view and you see a different picture.  For him it is more like a prize draw with mandarins running in and out as the total mounts up.

“£50 billion already.  Tell the NHS they can have the extra hospital.  It is touch and go on the new frigate though.  Will we get above the new red line?”

The art of the tax collector is, as Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert famously said, that of “so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”  That means he looks at the economy in much the same way as a man whose wife is out for the day looks at the fridge.  There are plenty of good things in there.  It is just a question of which will yield the most pleasure in proportion to the hassle involved.

One possibility is to begin with something large, the fiscal equivalent of a leg of cold lamb, I suppose.  Taking a small slice will certainly reduce the amount left, and (unless the wife actually measured it before going out, in which case hunger is the least of your problems) it will probably not be noticed.  OK then, let’s start with an adjustment or two to the already over-complicated national insurance rules.

Then there is the cold broccoli of the tax system, the things which voters don’t care about or would rather see removed.  The proceeds of tax avoidance are an obvious one.  The Chancellor can seize those for all he is worth.

But all this is to overlook something important.  In every fridge there are the items which are well past their ‘sell by’ date.  Very tempting indeed, but of course there is risk.  Reliefs for non domiciliaries may seem out of date, but if they are abolished and huge revenue sources leave the UK, the Chancellor will have shot himself in the foot just as surely as the fridge browser who eats the pate too late shoots himself in the stomach.

There are other possibilities too, each with its own risks and rewards, and the skill of the Chancellor is to get the balance right.  That explains something which has puzzled many of us for some time.

In these days of female emancipation, fridge browsing is one of the few essentially male skills left.  Women may captain industry and charge with the Royal Marines.  They may even rule the UK, but no woman has ever achieved the full fridge browsing skills of a man.  That ability to judge without measurement, cut and leave no trace, avoid using a plate or napkin and generally to extract nutrient in a way which leaves the fridge contents apparently undisturbed has been conferred by a happy genetic accident on the male sex.

That of course is why there may be very successful lady monarchs, lady prime ministers, lady home secretaries and lady Lord Chancellors.  However there has never been and never can be a lady Chancellor of the Exchequer.

 

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