It looks like it's going to be a brutal few months for some people.



I presume that this won't impact on this on low incomes. That said, £2000 on a middle income may be tricky to find at short notice within such a short timescale.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11265400

They bloody well should apologise. Their mistake, not ours.

Well, I doubt he had anything to do with the mistake but an appology should be issued from HMRC to the public and this should come from the highest authority.

It would be stupid to ask whatever he is called to say, "Sorry 'I' made a mistake," but by doing this he is only increasing public anger.

If there's anything he needs to apologise for, it's losing the Treasury £6bn by letting Vodafone off so lightly.

Well, he has apologized now. Damage done - he's not made the situation any better.

well he got really Pwned today. In the cases where it would cause hardship they should forget collecting the money at all.

HMRC - you screw up, and you're responsible - they screw up, and you're responsible.

I haven't received a letter from them (yet), but I think they've got a [LIFTED] cheek asking anyone to cough up just because the taxman is incompetent.

Just hope that if you do, you don't owe more than £2000. You'll have a very short period of time to pay it back.

I was just listening to a podcast about the problems with the HMRC. The morale there is very low, they where already underfunded, and the staff blame the software being written by non tax people. For example it does not use NI numbers as identifiers. Then they reckon that even more money is not being collected. They could clear the deficit practically overnight through better collection of taxes from those that evade it.

Just to maximise coverage...

From the first page of the latest Private Eye...

"£2bn - Under-charged PAYE tax that HMRC "cannot afford" to write off, according to the Treasury.

£6bn - Tax avoided by Vodafone that HMRC did write off."

I'm on the local trades council which has a fair few civil service members. Nobody particularly likes the tax man (and this incident hasn't done much to help matters) but I thought it was interesting to hear about the proposed cuts from someone inside the CS.

Basically, at a time when the government should be making every effort to increase tax revenue, they are proposing to cut the number of tax inspectors. Guess which section of society this is most likely to benefit.

The problem is that the top civil servants are grossly out of touch. They need to apologise. I am actually quite supportive of them. They get governments coming in who change the taxes but the revenue and customs do not get extra funding to deal with this, plus they are up against thousands of accountants trying to work the system in their clients favour. It is a no win situation. If the government actually increased the funds to the tax man they could actually solve these problems and close the loopholes and raise a lot more money. Though that will not benefit the Tory paymasters.