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...

 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...

 Even Little Jack Horner would have trouble finding anything good in the Brexit pie , but one plum might be the UK Global Tariff, which replaces the EU’s Common External Tariff. If you’ve never had to import or export anything (let’s face it, that’s most of us) the Tariff is the list of the Commodity Codes for every product you might want to bring in, together with the potential rate of customs duty. Praise Mona, I never had much to do with customs duty in my day-to-day work with HMRC. I used the Tariff more to decide if products were liable to Excise Duty. If that sounds double-dutch, just remember it was the EU’s tariff! More on that later. Being British, the UK Tariff has been made easier than the EU Tariff. For a start, everything is calculated in pounds, rather than Euro’s. Percentages have been rounded down. “Nuisance tariffs” have been eliminated under the thinking that anything under 2.5% is so low it costs more to collect than the tax it brings in.  A whopping 47% of ...

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*. ...