The news that PWC will be allowing its staff to work flexibly and have Friday afternoons off in the Summer is what you might call "cautiously positive".  Especially the comment from UK chairman Kevin Ellis that, "We want to help enshrine new working patterns so they outlast the Pandemic. Without conscious planning now , there's a risk that we lose the best bits of these new ways of working when the economy opens up again." As I said last week , HMRC has spent years trying to emulate the private sector. And as we all know, the social distancing rules mean that it is currently impossible to fully occupy office buildings the way we used to.  Earlier this week , I said that the Covid crisis hit while HMRC was in the middle of its "Building Our Future" programme. This meant closing a number of regional offices so that the entire HMRC workforce could be squeezed into a handful of city offices where they could "bounce off each other." Due to Covid...

  "Why is it?" someone once asked, "that people can be perfectly reasonable when they work in the Department, and then become utter bastards as soon as they set up as tax consultants?" The only explanation I could think of was that they knew that decisions about tax were sometimes a matter of interpretation and nuance and got frustrated that they couldn't get their hands under the bonnet any more.  (Before any Pukka Sahibs  kick off to say, "it's not that way in direct tax", I'll make it clear I'm talking from the limited perspective of Cream Tea Duty). As far as interpreting the law goes, the job of an Officer in Cream Tea Duty was to say, "No you can't do that!" It was the job of the Higher Officer to then come along, stroke his chin and say, "Hmm, let's see if there's another way of looking at that." Of course, when it suited tax consultants, they'd often say, "Parliament makes the law. It's n...

  Just over a week since everyone was getting nostalgic about the first day of lockdown in March 2020 and now the Prime Minister has come out and said we've "had enough day's off working at home," and should "make a stab at going back to the office."  I was pleased to see the Prime Minister's statement because last May there were reports that Johnson had asked his advisors to come up with a catchy slogan to "send the fearful back to work." I'd started to worry that even the fabled nudge unit had been defeated this time, but just in time here they are with, " You've had enough time off at home, now get back to the office!" Of course, there have been changing attitudes to the office over the years in HM Revenue and Customs. In Customs and Excise the first VAT compliance officers were supposed to be out visiting all week and only expected in the office on Friday to hand-write their reports, draft letters for the typists and hit t...

  My use of the term Pukka Sahib's to describe former Inland Revenue inspectors, may have given the impression that HM Revenue and Customs wasn't one big happy family. And that's not the case. I've made some good friends from the former Inland Revenue side. But when you bring two organisations together there's always going to be a bit of mutual suspicion. The rumour that Inland Revenue inspectors always took an Assistant Officer out on visits with them to carry their briefcase and the perception that they were higher graded for doing the same work, created a bit of suspicion on the former Customs and Excise side that the "merger" was actually a takeover. If you're looking for similarities between the private and public sector, the apprehension that rattled around Customs and Excise offices was exactly the same as I'd heard described at limited companies that had been taken over. It was probably worse for the Senior Officers because they had more t...

No-one likes sitting listening to recorded music over the phone, so I felt sorry for the bloke the other day who was saying he'd been held in an HM Revenue and Customs phone queue for over an hour. But then he said, "They're probably all sat there eating doughnuts instead of picking up the phone. They ought to privatise it!"  There's an answer about the doughnuts*. But first of all, there's the idea that the private sector could run HMRC's functions better. Here's my top five reasons why it couldn't. 5 - It's been tried before. From 1992 to 1994, the Government set up a 'Market Testing' programme, to measure Civil Service efficiency against the private sector. Customs and Excise completed 40 market tests in one year, with 90% of the in-house bids successful. In other Government departments over 12,000 jobs were cut from the state payroll by being TUPE'd out to private contractors. But the National Audit Office pointed out to MP'...

Update: This isn't about how hard done by Civil Servants are. It's more about how we all cheat ourselves. Walking down to the train station yesterday at ten to six in the morning reminded me how many people are up early: delivery drivers dropping off bread and cakes - newsagents waiting for their own deliveries - cleaners reporting to pubs to deal with the mess from the night before. So, I'm not saying public sector employees are special. Just speaking from my own experience: I was listening to a report on the radio about British employees working excessive hours, and how Working From Home had made it worse. It reminded me of a chat I had last week with a manager still employed in the Civil Service. It was almost like talking to myself from a year ago. It starts with waking up at four in the morning with yesterday's problems still floating through your head. You still can't get back to sleep by five, and since you're working from home you think you may as well c...

  I said here that HM Revenue and Customs is not an interchangeable hive like 'The Borg' off  of 'Star Trek', even if that's what the Cabinet Office aspires to. Senior managers, and the IT wide boys think they'll be able to make it happen, but first they'll have to make all the taxes and duties fit the same box. Talking from personal experience, there's a big difference between SATT (Slap And Tickle Tax) and CTD (Cream Tea Duty). There's a lot of Slap And Tickle in the world, and that means a constant stream of people liable to be registered for the Tax. By comparison, there's a relatively small pool of traders need to be registered for Cream Tea Duty. But they bring in a comparative amount of money. When it comes to registration, there are specialist teams to deal with both taxes, but with Cream Tea Duty, a compliance officer will be much more involved in getting the trader registered because there's much more needs to be confirmed about th...

When the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise came together as HM Revenue and Customs in 2005, it  had a solid backbone of officers on the Law Enforcement side (what people generally thought of as Customs officers) backed up by many more International Trade specialists. From the perspective of Cream Team Duty, the Law Enforcement officers checked how many scones you had in your suitcase, while the International Trade officers checked that you'd declared the correct Tariff code for your clotted cream imports. Then, in July 2007, Gordon Brown had a vision of anyone entering the country being met by, "a single, uniformed checkpoint for passport control and customs." In early 2008, those Customs staff were shunted off to the new UK Border Agency. For both sides, there was ambiguity as to who was responsible for what. HMRC still owned Customs policy, but the UKBA was responsible for enforcing it. HMRC retained the International Trade auditors, but UKBA caught the smugglers*. ...

  Bruno: "You like my theories? You think they're okay?" Guy: "Sure, Bruno. They're all okay!" Senior Managers in the Civil Service must  often feel like Guy Haines in "Strangers On A Train" , going along with Bruno Antony's whimsical rambling and then suddenly realising they've committed themselves to a course of action that can only end in disaster.  Government departments are boasting they're going to shift posts out of London to level up the regions, at the same time as HM Revenue and Customs has been shutting down offices in the regions in order to move posts into the cities. Criss Cross, as Bruno would say. Things weren't much different back in 2005, when HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue merged into   HM Revenue and Customs . The Civil Service was being measured up for surgery by the efficiency experts Gershon and Lyons. Peter Gershon prescribed resources being redirected to "the frontline", while academi...

 HM Revenue and Customs staff would love to email you, for all the reasons you can list: it eliminates "telephone tag" - it's particularly good for getting hold of punters who don't work in an office. It's quick, it provides both sides of the conversation with an audit trail and a written record of what's been said. If someone has to research an answer, they can go off and do it without keeping you hanging on the phone (or worse, guessing).  Some HMRC staff can  email you. And that makes it more frustrating when you come up against someone saying they're not allowed to email you. But as I said here   HMRC is a collection of individual units, each with its own rules and procedures. Some allow staff to use their personal email address to contact punters. Others only allow the use of arm's-length in-boxes. Others just ban the use of email. Why do they ban email? There are many reasons. The fear of fraud; They don't want someone spoofing or hi-jacking...

 A lot of people seem to think of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) as an interchangeable hive, like "The Borg" in Star Trek. If there's no-one available from the SATT section, pull someone in from CTD and they'll sort your problem out. That's not surprising, since it matches the aspiration of the Cabinet Office with its 'One Civil Service' programme where all Civil Servants will eventually be Lego people, working out of five big offices in the larger UK cities. But we're not there yet. To continue with the TV theme, at the moment HMRC is like a collection of soap operas. While "Coronation Street", "Eastenders" and "Emmerdale" might have common factors (serial killers, for instance), they all have their individual quirks and characteristics. The same applies to the administration of the different taxes and duties. You can't just roll from one to the other.  If you phone up the Rovers Return, and ask to speak to Sharon Mitc...