The tax man, the musician and the poet: a cautionary tale.

It couldn't last. All that laid-back, chilled cheerfulness induced by some out-of-season sun and warmth had to be dissipated, didn't it? So for pricking the bubble - in fact, for the prick of the year award - I nominate the tax-man. I suppose he mightn't like it if I named him, the almost-anonymous jobsworth who signed the letter to Mr B with a diagonal dash that bore no resemblance to the name typed beneath, and I actually don't know the gender as there is only an initial, but here's to you, AD, for raising a rant.

For a start, the letter dated 7 February comes in response to a written query dated 25 November which arrived in the tax offices on 28 November. Nothing unusual there - the workings of HMRC are glacial. The joyful tidings can be summarised in the opening of the second paragraph: I can confirm that you are still due to pay the amount as shown on the tax calculation that we sent you. They go on: You are obliged to obtain and retain all original documentary evidence of all allowances, reliefs, income, pay and tax, even if you are not required to complete a Tax Return, to allow you to check your liability and to allow you to inform HMRC of any income which has not been fully taxed. 

I hope you're paying attention. I hope you're doing this - are you?

The letter goes on, in impenetrable jargon, to tell him that he was issued a notice of coding blah blah for the year 2009-10 in January 2009. It's the following sentence that seems particularly impenetrable "HMRC have checked with your pension provider, SPPA Finance and HMRC agree that no error was made for which action can be taken." Quite apart from the weak punctuation that arouses doubt as to what the writer is actually saying, it looks to this non-accounting mind as if what they are saying is "We made a boob; your pension provider took it as being correct; it's not their (SSPA's) fault - because "they acted with reasonable care, based on the information they held at the time." The letter goes on: "You were notified of this decision on 2 November 2011 and that decision stands. I reiterate that your pension provider is not to be held accountable for the liability notified because it is your liability and remains due ..."


The letter goes on to make it clear that all these codes with which HMRC issue us have intrinsic meanings and that it's our duty to understand these and check them. "It is your responsibility to check (these) and to check your liability and you would then have had knowledge of any errors occurring and then would have been able to inform HMRC." Eh? Let's clarify the actual situation here. We have someone who has not filled in a tax return since PAYE was introduced, someone whose salary was publicly known and who never worked in a private capacity to earn extra money, someone who, furthermore, has been retired and in receipt of the same pension for the past seven years - and suddenly HMRC decide to send him a new tax code and get it wrong and it's his responsibility to check it? What precisely are these tax people paid to do?


The nastiest paragraph states "... you were fully aware that your tax affairs were not in order (as you have stated that you know that the incorrect PAYE tax code was being operated when compared against the notice of coding P2 dated 16 January 2009, yet you did not act to try to correct the issue. The evidence you have sent confirms that you were aware, (sic) of the situation, (sic) but did not act." Seeing that a different coding has been applied and automatically knowing that it's a mistake are two different things, surely?

Given that figures and taxation are part of a foreign country into which I have recently had to travel because of consultancy work, I know that these people blunder - but had they not done so quite so blatantly at the end of last year when they sent me two different codings within a week and then took a chunk off my pension as a result, I would not have assumed this. (I did not, by the way, ever recoup any money lost in the month when I was waiting for the repayment of this chunk).

Seems to me that the operatives at HMRC get things wrong rather too often for comfort and then send out these missives of hectoring and patronising jargon which threaten rather than apologise and assure us that they will take the money and there's not a thing we can do to stop them. We are expected to have a grasp of their arcane procedures, be we musicians or poets - even though their letters are so badly written that they could well do with the blethers' course in Plain English. Do the rest of us get off with blunders on such a regular and harmful fashion? Doctors, maybe? Dentists? (ouch)


From now on until I pop my clogs, I'm going to phone HMRC every time a bit of official paper arrives chez blethers, be it a tax coding or an allowance. I'm going to query every last thing. Join me. They asked for it.

Taxed out of pocket

For years I never thought about income tax. It came off my salary, codes were issued, things remained much the same. I retired, new codes were issued, I still didn't have to think about it. Until I began working in an intermittent, self-employed fashion, and everything seemed to unravel. And strangely enough, I'm not actually referring to the tedious business of filling in an online tax return - though goodness knows it's enough to put me off working any more. But the very act of sending in a couple of returns seems to have done something to upset the tax machine (I believe they use computers to check things nowadays. That figures.)

In September I received two tax codes - apparently on the same SSPA pension. One was the usual code, one was unfamiliar. I phoned to enquire. It transpired that this was in fact an error; someone (something?) had got it into its head that I had two pensions and they were determined to tax the second to within an inch of its worth. They would send me another, correct code and all would be well.

Except that it isn't. Well, I mean. Because by the time they made this discovery - or I made it for them - it was only two days before the deduction was made from my pension, and it was too late to change it. The result was that my latest pension payment is some £600 less than it should be. Today I rang again, just to have the satisfaction of telling someone I was pissed off at this. The scenario I painted was that of the poor pensioner, with Christmas coming ... you get the picture. Were they maybe running a profitable enterprise on the side and calling it a mistake? I ended my litany of complaint with a question. "Don't you think that's iniquitous?" I asked. Long silence. I tried again. "Don't you think that's really bad?" Well yes, allowed the woman at the other end, it was not good but there was nothing she personally could do about it. The money would eventually be repaid, but I would have to do without it in the meantime.

Which of course I knew. I told her it would be really good to contact someone who could do something about it. Like a wee recompense?  She didn't know if that would be possible, but she gave me an address. She had no name to give me, as there was no single person who would deal with my case. I observed that this was a pity, as it was always good to have someone to nag by name, and that perhaps a bit of undivided attention on individual cases would avoid some of the errors that abound. She didn't reply.

The call was, of course, recorded for control purposes. The wifie wouldn't be likely to say anything too definite. But I may pursue that address, just for the hell of it. You never know ...

Grauniad alive and well and better online

I had the interesting experience yesterday - yes, I know there was a wedding going on, but there was life beyond that - of experiencing for myself the difficulties of writing for someone else. On Thursday, I saw a tweet from @commentisfree asking for someone to write, in a hurry, about the experience of being a grandparent. It was already 11am, and the deadline was 1pm. Great, I thought, I like a challenge - and I qualified on the grandparenting side. So after my coffee I set to, and duly dispatched the required 250 words. (I think I maybe wrote 252 words)

Back came a mail saying they'd use it. I'd seen the online tale about Gwyneth Paltrow badmouthing her grandma; I expected to see my stuff online. A phone call later in the afternoon, however, told me it'd be in the paper as well, so I duly bought one of Dunoon's limited stock of guardians the following morning.

To put it briefly, my piece was crap. It had been edited out of all recognition, into a jaggedly unimaginative lump devoid of paragraphs ( I know - space restrictions) with the sequencing altered and so drastically cut that it didn't actually make sense. They didn't even get my "comment is free" name right. Someone who knows me well said it didn't sound like me at all, and I was glad to hear this. I gave heartfelt thanks that usually I write only for myself, and that  our local paper treats what I write with respect. I know newspapers have to consider column inches and that once a paper's out that's it - it can't be changed - but I had never really considered the implications for print journalists.

Thing is, I'm not a print journalist. I'm not a journalist at all. Putting that castrated rubbish in the paper makes it look as if "amateurs" can't write to save themselves, and makes this "amateur" determined that she won't do anything so silly again. But if they're going to invite submissions, the Guardian needs to think about what they're doing.

To balance all this, I have to report that when the online version appeared - and you can read it here - it was more or less what I had written, and - better still - the mistakes I pointed out to @commentisfree Jessica were immediately remedied. Maybe this happens every time anyone writes for print media - and maybe that's why I'm becoming such a fan of online reporting.

But there's still something nice about seeing it in print ...