I've just been listening to a Civil Service World podcast called "It's Personal," and in particular a segment called "How do you make tax feel less taxing?" It's an interview with Claire Walsh and John Swift from HMRC's Customer Experience Directorate who talk about their attempts to improve customer service. Your heart may sink when they start talking about mapping customer journey's to improve services and bringing colleagues on the transformation journey but you know what they're describing. Even though we wouldn't use the same language, they're basically following a sound strategy. What did disappoint me was that there was the lack of detail. For instance, we were told that they won some kind of award for improving the bereavement process. But they didn't tell us how they improved the bereavement process. I recall from seven years ago that HMRC's bereavement was fundamentally flawed, starting with the DWP offering a ...

  The Betrayer is – as the cover sticker says – the inspiration for the Netflix series LEGENDS. I don’t have Netflix, so I haven’t seen the show, but a lot of the publicity turns around how Stanton (played by Tom Burke) was plucked from HM Customs and Excise airport baggage searching, given two weeks training, and sent undercover with the drug gangs. Whether that reflects the series or not, The Betrayer shows that Stanton had a more paced progress from admin, through airport anti-smuggling, local VAT control and Collection Investigation Unit, onto the Investigation Division. But it’s true that, when Stanton is asked to apply for a new undercover team, “we had no undercover training course of our own, so I had to pick up tips from colleagues who had done it in the past.” There is some fascinating detail about HMCE’s varied attempts to develop undercover training, before settling on the police SO10 course and Greater Manchester Police’s Henri Exton, who had devised his own psychologi...

WHY POLITICIANS LIE ABOUT TRADE By Dmitry Grozoubinski – Canbury Press 2024 If you ask why you should take the time to learn about International Trade, Dmitry Grozoubinski tells you: “the fact that important people keep lying to us about it proves its importance.” He makes no secret of the fact that International Trade is hard to understand; as glutinous and opaque as a silica blancmange. But in this book he spoons it towards our mouths with humour and makes it easy to swallow. The danger of trade is that although we think the detail is boring, any TV vox pop proves that we all think we have a gut instinct for trade. As Grozoubinski says this leaves us open to “confidently spouted rubbish disguised as plain spoken common sense.” Politicians exploit the counter-intuitive nature of trade to skewer us like pike on a hook. In public debate we have also lost, “the art of condensing complexity into punchy soundbites…or crafting an accessible analogy that resonates.”  In this handy book h...

  The I've Been Everywhere Man There’s a lot of anger going around about pensions. The old are outraged about the state pension being called a benefit.  The young are outraged that their National Insurance is paying the pensions of old people.  As usual, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. It feels like Governments of the past 40 years were happy to let punters think they were "buying" a pension with their national insurance contributions. But now they want to postpone (by raising the state pension age) or cut back the rate of pension the Govt (Tory & Labour) has been reminding us that the State Pension is really a Benefit. It's just another gift they can withhold or reduce. And the biggest self-inflicted myth, is probably that pensions were going to provide us with some future life of luxury. The idea behind the state pension was always that it would stop you from falling into absolute poverty. It was never going to provide you with the life of the “I’ve Been Ever...

  The November 2024 Inheritance Tax protests by farmers generated some unwanted flack about "rich farmers driving around on duty free red diesel." In among the concerns about townies not understanding the problems of country folk, the whole issue is like a red oily rag to a bull.  As HMRC Notice 75 will tell you, rebated marked gasoil (or red diesel) is not intended for use as a road fuel.  The law behind this is the Hydrocarbon Oils Duty Act 1979, which says that marked gasoil, ( or chemically marked and dyed gasoil) can only be used in ‘excepted machines’.  The definition of an excepted machine depends on the type of vehicle (for instance, an agricultural vehicle) and the use (for instance, agriculture).  It must be classed as an agricultural tractor by the DVLA and be unlicensed under the Vehicle Excise Registration Act. If a tractor has a general vehicle excise license as a haulage vehicle, it cannot use red diesel because it is not solely intended for agric...

 90 Degrees In The Shade isn’t a film about Customs or Excise (or even VAT) but I think it’s a very vivid dramatization of the experience of an audit.  Donald Wolfit and Rudolf Hrusinsky The film was made in 1965 as a pioneering co-production between Britain and communist Czechoslovakia (the Czech title Tricet Jedna Ve Stinu restores the temperature to Celsius) with the script co-written by David Mercer. Anne Heywood and James Booth play employees in a Czech state grocery store, who have been selling off the stock of brandy and replacing them with bottles of cold tea. Booth’s character is the prime-mover in the fraud and has been having an affair with Heywood.  Czech stage star Rudolf Hrusinsky and Britain’s Sir Donald Wolfit play inspectors who come in to audit the stock. Wolfit’s character is part of the local management, laid back and friendly. Hrusinsky has been sent in from head office as a meticulous ‘scalp-hunter.’  The movie recreates the combined tension and...

  Covid 19 and the Bus and Coach Industry by Glynne Stewart Pegg  North Riding Classic Bus. £14.99 ISBN 978-183841687-4 This book covers the effect of Covid 19 on the Bus and Coach industry from 2020 to 2023. It is “profusely illustrated” (as they used to say) and this makes it a valuable document of a time which already seems to be vanishing from our collective memory. Photos showing hand sanitizer bottles on buses, signs saying “keep your distance” and warnings not to talk to the masked driver already look like stills from a science fiction movie. Glynne Stewart Pegg was an economist, industry historian and part time bus and coach driver throughout lockdown. Ironically, he had been due to make a work visit to bus manufacturers in Wuhan in January 2020 but was advised to delay his journey as the first news of Covid was acknowledged. The first UK death from Covid was announced in March 2020, and this was quickly followed by full lockdown. Pegg wrote the first edition of the bo...

Reading HMRC’s advert for enthusiastic team players to join its Surge and Rapid Response Team, my response is to wish them a sincere Best of British.  When I started this blog, I warned myself that my experience of HMRC was time-limited and would soon become outdated. Even so, I can only hope their enthusiasm is rewarded. When I joined HM Customs and Excise as a Band 1 (50% of an Admin Assistant) my goals and targets were easy: make it to the first week, make it to the first month, follow the rules, do what you were told and get past my probationary period.  In my first month I witnessed a retirement speech in which a bearded old exciseman told everyone that the wheels were coming off the wagon and management didn’t have a clue. I watched it with indifference because (as I said) I was focussed on following the rules and doing what I was told. I never dreamed that one day I’d be taking the same jaundiced view – or even that I’d give a damn. Looking back at the internal structur...

  I’ve said before that I think merging the Inland Revenue with Customs and Excise wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but shifting the Law Enforcement side over to the Border Force helped to unbalance HM Revenue and Customs moral compass.  Even so, while researching the HM Customs on TV articles, I’ve been struck by the antagonistic attitude of the press. In 1986 the Sunday Mirror trailed The Collectors TV series by asking readers if they’d, “ever tried to smuggle a bottle of booze or packet of ciggies through the customs? And cursed the peaked-cap Customs man for an interfering busybody?” And in the Belfast News Letter, columnist Charles Fitzgerald began his review of The Duty Men by saying, “If you believe that Governments should not interrupt the free circulation of such indispensable items by imposing monstrous taxes on them and pricing them out of reach, then like me you’ll not think beating the Revenue to be much of a crime, “ and boasting, “many’s the bottle of good French...

 In the spirit of the HM Revenue and Customs merger I have been searching for films and TV shows about the Inland Revenue. I haven’t found a whole TV series yet but, I did come across an Armchair Theatre from 17 December 1961.  Raymond Huntley and Henry McGee It’s called Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle by Ronald Hardy and stars Raymond Huntley as F.K. Gaunt, Inspector of Taxes (Huntley was, I hasten to remind you, the second actor to play Dracula in Hamilton Deane’s 1927 stage play). Author Ronald Hardy was an accountant, who based his first novel, The Place of Jackals on his experiences as a liaison officer in Indochina during the war. He continued to write thrillers such as 1973’s The Face Of Jalanath, in which the hero Farran leads a group of hand-picked mountaineers on a suicidal climb across the Kashmiri peak to destroy Red China’s vast nuclear complex of Su Tokai. It’s a surprise, then, that Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle is a sardonic comedy. Hardy had actually sold the story to...

  Despite the success of the 1987 BBC documentary series, The Duty Men, the failure of the 1986 series The Collectors made it hard for the BBC was unwilling to contemplate another Customs-based drama series. Independent producer Paul Knight was looking for a follow-up to his successful ITV series London’s Burning. He told reporter Annie Leake that, “I realised there were tremendous possibilities there for a fictional series. In many cases HMCE’s powers far outreach those of the police. It’s surprising that the BBC didn’t spot the potential first.” By a strange coincidence, one of the London’s Burning directors was Keith Washington, who had also worked on The Collectors! Writer Anita Bronson based the scripts for The Knock (named after the call-sign for a raid, and consciously echoing The Sweeney) on extensive research. Inevitably, some of the scenes recall The Duty Men. A “classic-bag-switch” in the penultimate episode seems very much like a scene from the BBC series, right down to...

 Fly-on-the-wall tv documentary shows are so commonplace today that it is hard to imagine what a big deal a series like The Duty Men was back in 1987 – made in the days of heavy film cameras and sound equipment in a much less open society.  While the 1986 drama series, The Collectors had proven unsuccessful for the BBC, the Corporation had an ace up its sleeve. During the same time period, documentary maker Paul Hamann was collaborating with HM Customs and Excise on the 1987 BBC2 documentary series: The Duty Men. Hamann had made over 40 documentaries for the BBC (as a producer for the BBC’s Open-Door Unit, he helped residents of Belfast’s Divis Flats in the Falls Road make a documentary about their poor housing conditions). His 1985 ‘Real Lives’ documentary about extremism in Northern Ireland was the subject of a special meeting of the BBC Board of Governors after an article by the Sunday Times resulted in Home Secretary Leon Brittan (who had not seen the film) demanding the B...