The Inland Revenue

The Inland Revenue, Again
I seem to have a cursed relationship with the Inland Revenue in the UK. When I was working other people would tell me that the Inland Revenue were OK but to watch out for the hard men working on VAT. My experience was totally the contrary; I found the VAT people helpful and the Inland Revenue at times impossible to deal with. Now I'm trying to file my tax return for last year.........

It all started in the late 1980s when the Inland Revenue decided to stick me with a demand for £7000 for tax on “director's emoluments” which I had never taken/received. They had no evidence for the demand but they can do that and it was my job to prove them wrong (prove a negative? .....never mind). As it happened, I had always been in favour of the Inland Revenue having draconian powers provided they could be relied upon to use them sensibly, e.g. to get at money laundering, etc. But can you ever trust a government department to act sensibly? Clearly, they were after all the money I was making from gun and drug running, prostitution, etc, despite the fact that the sums involved were pocket money in their terms.

After over a year of replying to requests for information and piles of correspondence they sent bailiffs to my house to collect their dues. I, with the help of my accountant, appealed to my local MP. He extracted from the Inland Revenue a letter which closely resembled the type of signed confession extracted by tyrannical regimes before they stuck someone against a wall and shot them: “failure to carry out instruction, failure of internal communication,” apologies, etc. All this went on of course with the Inspector of Taxes. I then received a letter from the Collector of Taxes demanding payment of interest on the tax that was now agreed never to have been due in the first place. I pointed out that the tax had never been due and the Collector replied that he operated independently of the Inspector of taxes (as he does) and was entitled to collect the interest he demanded. At this point my accountant stepped in as I could not be relied upon to reply coherently or without uttering threats and simply said that if the Collector of taxes persisted then the matter would again be referred to the MP and, if necessary, the Ombudsman; and he asked for written confirmation that the Collector would cease to pursue the matter. The Collector did cease to pursue the matter but I never got the letter of confirmation.

I applied for tax residence status in France when I left England, completing and signing a form P85 which is supposed to do the job. Dream on. There is much more documentation to be supplied, including an intriguing form R85. This my bank asked me to sign in order to receive (pitiful) interest gross. It's obviously intended for the job but states specifically that it cannot be accepted from anyone resident outside the UK. Catch 22? Anyway, this year (two and a half years later) I had my French resident status for tax purposes accepted by (now) HMRC in a letter which said specifically to fill in on my next tax return only the tax paid on my private pension. Which I duly did, returned the form and duly had it rejected on the grounds that I had filled in only the tax paid on my private pension. I notice that the rejected return had been stamped “SA Stockton Group”. So I'm assuming at the moment that this is a case of outsourcing with, in time honoured government tradition, little or no communication between government and outsourcer(er). If not, here we go again................