Thursday, 17 December 2009
More on catching the tax dodgers
HMRC has also revamped its process for receiving anonymous tip-offs concerning tax evaders, details of which are here. To be truly anonymous, one would suppose that many would baulk at filling in an on-line form, given that web masters can generally see the IP address of whoever logs in to a web page; that is if they really want to. Similar identification issues would deter people from sending faxes.
I have a vision of the other choices:
1.Telephoning the 0800 number, remembering to withhold the caller's number, and then speaking in a hoarse whisper to drop the malefactor in it.
2.Sending an anonymous missive either with letters cut out of newspapers and stuck on to another sheet of paper, or longhand notes in purple or green ink, signed “Well-wisher” or “Bystander”.
The mind boggles, or at least mine does, but that may be the effect of Christmas being nearly upon us and my having done far too many Tax Returns for my own good.
© Jon Stow 2009
Saturday, 10 October 2009
HMRC's stealth taxation through technology
“Company Tax Returns and XBRL
XBRL stands for Extensible Business Reporting Language, which is an international standard designed for business financial reporting.
At the moment accounts and other attachments to online CT600 returns can be sent in PDF format. From April 2011 (and for all CT600 returns due after 31 March 2011) we expect that all CT600 returns will have to be sent online, and will have to include attachments using the XBRL format.
You don't have to wait till 2011 to change to XBRL, and we recommend you consider doing so before it becomes mandatory. Later in 2009-10 HMRC intends to introduce a CT filing product which uses XBRL (this will be aimed at smaller, unrepresented companies), and to introduce a new main CT Online service. Other software developers have introduced or are working on products which use XBRL.”
I find this very news disappointing, especially with the short time-scale. I assume that behind this is an intention to make company accounts more accessible to staff within HM Revenue & Customs, and will help their cost-cutting. The justification is the report by Lord Carter on HMRC on-line services amongst other things. Lord Carter had to revise his proposals on individual taxpayers' Self Assessment deadlines following a furore back in 2006 that they were impractical. It would be useful if we could have just a little more time to make the change.
Self Assessment itself was introduced as a cost-cutting exercise, though it increased the cost burden of compliance for taxpayers.
The effect of the new requirement for XBRL format is to transfer further costs to taxpayers. The increase in software costs for tax agents will either have to be passed on to clients or the agents will have to bear them. No doubt the specialist tax software providers will have their developers working furiously to be ready for 2011 and they will need to charge the end user. Unfortunately the change will amount to a stealth tax even on those businesses which are not in profit. I believe in value billing, but increased overheads in software costs do not provide value for the agent or the end-user business. It is very difficult to provide the best value to clients whilst having to dance to the Treasury's discordant tune.
© Jon Stow 2009
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Sunday, 16 August 2009
HMRC and customer service
Because there is almost no one in HMRC with whom the ordinary population can speak who actually knows anything about tax, taxpayers just have to grub along or pay someone else. It gets worse as demonstrated by a visit I made to an older couple this week. Their problem was that another elderly relative had died and they had been left to administer the estate. They had been sent a Form R27 which, for the uninitiated, is a Return of income for the previous 6th April up to the date of death of the deceased, and which is completed by the Executors or Administrators of an Estate. The couple had filled in the form but missed out completing two sections. An Assistant Officer at HMRC had sent it back with the two sections marked with red crosses and asked the worthy couple to complete the details required. Of course they dud not have a clue which is why they had telephoned me.
Now in the good old days these Executors could have taken their papers and the form to the Tax Office and had help completing the form on the spot. Nowadays, even if they could find the person who penned the red crosses, he probably would not have had a clue either, which is why after a couple of months he returned the form with such an unhelpful letter.
I reckoned the repayment due to the estate was less than £100, but the couple had not collected all the information needed to fill in the R27. I dictated letters to the organisations concerned, which the wife took down in shorthand, and said that when they had received replies they would be able to complete the form and send it off. If they were still unsure they should call me.
I came away feeling unable to bill for my 45 minutes plus the short drive. I had done the tedious Money Laundering check because that is obligatory but by the time I had done an engagement letter, written the letters myself and dealt with HMRC I would have done far more work and costs would have far exceeded the refund due to the very small estate. Effectively I had to treat it as charity work.
HMRC calls taxpayers customers, but customer service has become an alien concept. When I was a young tax junior you could track down anyone in the Revenue and get things sorted out over the telephone, which is no longer possible with the call centres.
Why should I have to do for nothing something HMRC cannot be bothered to do because it has changed itself into an even less friendly organisation than BT or my bank? Yes, those who cannot afford to pay for representation can go to TaxAid, but why should they have to, and though I am happy to help out, I think we tax advisers and agents are taken for granted and not afforded proper respect by HMRC. However, if they treat their customers like that, what do I expect?
© Jon Stow 2009
Monday, 18 May 2009
Taxpayers as customers and the service they receive
HMRC, or at least the Inland Revenue as they were called, did once upon a time provide a service to individual taxpayers, prior to Self Assessment. Of course many people feared the tax man as they thought, even though going back a long time the majority of staff were women as now. However, with minor errors in Tax Returns or even quite major but obviously unintentional incorrect completion of Returns, one could expect a letter suggesting a correct interpretation, or very often a telephone call from the Tax Office along the lines of “Have you forgotten your bank interest? Drop us a line with the figures and we will make an adjustment.”
Now it is true to say that there was a lot wrong with the old system. There was a tradition of issuing estimated assessments every year against which the taxpayer or the adviser would appeal as a matter of routine, but this was largely a question of regulating the flow of tax payments as routinely one would offer a payment on account. It was a daft system latterly (that is prior to 1996-97) but it was a system that was many years out of date. The estimated assessment routine became more fashionable in the latter stages before Self Assessment as the Revenue realised that they had to get money in. When I started in tax, one rarely saw an assessment issued unless a Tax Return had been put in, and there was little incentive for the more laissez faire taxpayers to do so. Why put in a tax return and have to pay tax, cutting into one's holiday money for St. Trop?
So, something had to be done, and though there had been tightening up of interest charges for late payment of tax, there really needed to be a system of making people submit tax returns and fining them if they didn't, as other jurisdictions already did. I think the Revenue had looked at America's Internal Revenue Service and thought they were along the right lines.
Anyway, the major change was to make people responsible for calculating their own tax liabilities, and with the wholesale introduction of a new computer system they had an automatic checking facility and automated fines and levies of interest charges. The major triumph at the time was to start massive cost cutting (this is one thing we cannot blame the current Government for) by getting rid of more qualified staff who actually knew about tax in favour of computers and call centre staff. Not all of this happened at the same time; there has been and will continue to be for a while yet an ongoing process of closing tax offices in favour of call centres and reducing the numbers of personnel who actually understand tax issues.
As the onus is now on the “customer” to calculate his or her tax due, this means that many who originally filled in the figures and waited for an assessment now have to either employ someone to prepare the accounts and tax return or wade into the online service and hope the figures they put in are the correct ones, especially if they are based on prepared accounts.
I earn my living to quite an extent by preparing Tax Returns and accounts for people who are not confident or know they are not competent to do it themselves. Obviously I am not complaining about this, but I think it is unfortunate that the amateur has to wade through so much information to manage without help. The Tax Return Guide is helpful with the basics, but cannot educate anyone in all the tax rules that we professionals have to know, and that is fundamentally unfair. It means that the individual taxpayers largely have to pay someone else to do what the Civil Service used to do on their behalf.
It is not as though information is very easy to find on the HMRC website. Although at a tax professionals' meeting with HMRC we were told that the website was being made much easier to use, I had to use Google to find on the HMRC website what their own search facility could not: that 5.75 million tax returns were filed online for 2008-09 by the deadline of 31st January 2009. I suspect a good proportion of those filed were by agents such as my firm. There were many glitches using HMRC's own online program, such as an inability to bring forward trading or lettings losses from a previous year. There was a work-around involving writing a note to oneself for next year. I did one Return using HMRC's own software, and had I not been a professional I would have been driven to distraction and probably given up.
The point of writing this piece is not to say that we should go back to the bad old days of estimated assessments, and the confusing-for-many previous year basis of taxing trading and untaxed sources. It is just that over ten years down the line of Self Assessment there is still so much work to be done in terms of improving the system and getting an HMRC website that is fit for purpose. Yes, the information is mostly there and the site is vast, but if a tax and internet geek like me cannot whistle up the content I need in short order, what hope is there for someone who has little tax knowledge, because that person will not even know what he or she is looking for? HMRC need to look at the news websites such as the BBC and CNN to see how the categories can be drilled down better into general headings, with menus underneath, sub menus and so on, so that amateurs (and journalists trying to check the ins and outs of MPs' expenses or whatever) can find what they are looking for.
Why has it taken so long to make the system work, and how much longer is it going to take? When is the “customer” going to benefit from doing all the work on the Government's behalf? Is not the taxpayer in reality more of a part-time contractor or employee engaged by the Treasury?
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Monday, 11 May 2009
What's cooking with HMRC, MPs and networking?
I took the trouble to make notes, but cannot see on re-reading them that I really learned very much. One lady was able to assure us that they were working hard to improve the website, including the deplorable search function (generally it is better to tell Google to search the HMRC site) and to tell us that we practitioners had been re-labeled as “tax agents and advisers”, an unexpected re-branding from outside. Maybe they will stop calling their hapless taxpayers “customers” but the customer word was repeated during the meeting a number of times so any move from upstairs has not reached the grass roots.
I did get some reassurance that HMRC is still interested in the small fry compliance failures such as letting income, casual earnings and bank interest (historical interest at present in more ways than one) and that they were still keen on rounding up reluctant customers. This sort of work is welcomed by me for one, and I do not see why anyone should get away with not paying tax which should be due. I am all for tax planning and saving clients tax, but am definitely not in favour of tax evasion planning!
I sent out my tax newsletter out this week. The Budget was not very nice; in fact rather depressing, though I did avoid it by being away. Still, there was no escape from the email and I am thoroughly up to speed. I have little hope that the Finance Bill will be scrutinised any more than others in recent years. Frankly, there was little help for small business and and it seems unlikely that MPs even understand anything about trusts and the proposed 50% tax rate from next April. Still, they have the exposure of their expenses to worry about. Frankly, even many of their “justifiable” expenses paid by the Exchequer would be taxable in an ordinary mortal's hands. They are like anyone else entitled to indulge in property dealing, but please, not with my money. No names, no pack drill, but some of the shenanigans I have heard of these past few days might be treated as trading liable to income tax rather than capital gains exempt due to flipping properties within the private residence rules. Some of this might be beyond HMRC now in terms of enquiry windows depending on how it was all reported to HMRC at the time.
In May we are definitely into the new season of tax returns etc.. I do like to meet face-to-face as many clients as possible at least once a year. The two I met with last week are really both some of the nicest people I know and they cheered me up. I learned a while back not to work with clients with whom I felt the relationship was difficult because there is much less pressure if we like our clients and they like us.
I am always on the look out for more nice clients and am trying a couple of new marketing strategies including some positive networking with as much giving as possible. I will let you know how I get on. Maybe barbecue networking will catch on in the long hot summer the Met Office is forecasting?
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Monday, 31 December 2007
The lighter side
I would not want people to think that I spend the whole time moaning about the government’s fiscal policy. The trouble is that I started this blog at the time when there had been announced a number of ill-considered policies. But, hey, let’s not say it is all doom and gloom.
As a tax practitioner I have to say that HM Revenue & Customs’ online filing system has been working well this year, at least for Self Assessment Tax Returns. I do not use the online filing for other purposes sufficiently to judge. I think that the user interface for HMRC’s own software is a lot improved and easier to understand, though I use commercial software for Self Assessment. That system uses FTP (I think that is what it is called) and when I started with it a couple of years ago it was very fussy and would reject returns for silly reasons such as characters it objected to. However, as I said, it all works well now, so well done to HMRC for this.
Then again, one has to laugh at some clients who deliver their papers over the Christmas period and expect feedback before the New Year. Yes, of course we poor souls have to work over the holiday, but that is on behalf of clients who delivered their papers at the end of November and early December. If only life were that easy. Receive each set of tax return papers, spend five minutes putting it all together and preparing a return, bill the client and go back to sleep. Actually we work rather hard and aim to give the clients a great service which is value for money, but we cannot manage too many quick changes in telephone boxes. I cannot even think offhand where there is a convenient telephone box in our area.
What I hope for 2008 is that we will have a new era of cooperation with HMRC to get the compliance done, and that there will a better understanding of tax agents’ issues on the part of HMRC (which might develop eventually from the “Working Together” programme) and that we can on our part stop blaming HMRC for everything and lay it on their political masters if we must. It would be nice if HMRC did not call taxpayers “customers” when they cannot take their business elsewhere. Dave, are you listening?
In the meantime, I must get back to working miracles for my clients and doing everything yesterday (it would be great if we could process all the information before we received it) and hope we advisers get a bit more appreciation. I appreciate others when they go beyond their duties. I would thank some staff in HMRC if one were allowed to know their full names as one often isn’t, but there have been one or two, even a few recently who were very helpful. At least they are all very polite (but then so am I).
Happy New Year to all HMRC staff, to anyone who happens to find this blog, and of course to all Rabbit’s friends and relations.
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