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...

  April 2024 marks ten years since HM Revenue and Customs breathlessly introduced their “national conversation” called “Building our Future.” Unveiled by chief executive Linda Homer, the one-sided conversation outlined the future shape of HMRC. Government had set priorities to maximise tax revenue, improve services and reduce costs. “We are going to put customers at the heart of everything we do. That means redesigning our processes around them, rather than the taxes they pay or benefits they receive.” Digitisation would automate many processes, cutting the need for some roles. ”We will continue to reduce in size and become even more highly skilled, and we will further consolidate into a small number of very large workplaces or Regional Centres.” “We think it’s an exciting future, but we know it won’t be for everyone.” It was followed up in November 2014 by “Building our Future 2: Continuing the Conversation.”  This led off with some finger-wagging from Linda Homer. “We’ve pic...

 Glancing at an old diary over the weekend, I realised that if I'd still been working for HMRC, today would have been a Mortise-and-Tenon Monday. Named after the old sliding games that preceded Rubik's Cube, and challenged line managers to squeeze a United Nations level of co-ordination into the working day. This was one of the many benefits of "Working in the Office." There was always re-organisation - especially in a processing unit. Every year a new strategy would be drawn up, new initiatives championed. Teams would be broken up, with their functions assigned to new managers. And since everyone was sitting at a desk with a computer, that would often mean people moving with their computers to a new desk. In the pre-Surface Pro days that meant picking up the base unit, keyboard and screen (together with desk drawers and contents) and wheeling them on a chair to the new base. But that was just the planned re-organisation. Sometime during the year, managers would reali...

 The first time I ventured into line management for HM Customs and Excise (as was), my outgoing manager made me a gift of a 1973 civil service textbook on staff reporting. As I’d always been the schoolboy, creeping like snail to appraisals, he obviously thought I needed the help. Even though HMCE (and later HMRC) had training materials, I don’t think any of it rivalled the clarity and unsentimentality of the 1973 booklet. Published by the Personnel Management (Training) Division of the Civil Service Department, it was an attempt to standardise Staff Reporting throughout the Civil Service. 750 draft copies were tested at all grades and departments before the programmed textbook was issued. While self-instruction was a new concept viewed with suspicion in comparison to formal learning, given time and staff hours the booklet judged the best way to roll the system out to over 150,000 reporting officers. The booklet sets out the general principles that staff reporting allows the organis...

  In the past few weeks, as refugees are turned away and charity shipments to the Ukraine get stalled at the borders because they don’t have customs paperwork, the term “jobsworth” has been slung around at the Home Office, Border Force and HMRC (and private contractors).  Now that things have calmed down a bit, it’s made me look back at being a “jobsworth”. I’ve just done a bit of research and found that the term became popular in the 1970’s when Esther Rantzen used to present a “Jobsworth of the Week” award on her TV show, That’s Life. The idea seems to be that a “jobsworth” is not just someone who rigidly applies the rules (as their contract of employment requires) but that they gleefully take the most rigid and obstructive interpretation of those rules, just to make life difficult. A lot of the folk who shout “jobsworth” do it when they’re wound up. Give them five minutes to calm down, and they’d admit it was unreasonable. But there are others who seem to have a Donald Trum...

 I saw some chat recently on the Any Answers section of AccountingWeb about the way different sections of HM Revenue and Customs responded to the Agent’s Authorisation form. One agent was upset because staff had refused to talk to them on the phone about their clients. The reason was that they didn’t have a 64-8 paper authorisation. They had an online authorisation in place, but HMRC said it only authorised them to file online . “Is it Ok that HMRC staff are told to lie?” one of them demanded. You can see it here  https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/is-it-ok-that-hmrc-staff-are-told-to-lie I can get how frustrating it is. I can get how perverse it seems. But HMRC will not have told staff to lie. As I said here , don’t think of HMRC as one unit – it’s more like a bunch of villages. And at the moment, the villagers keep moving from house to house as the work moves around. And when we were talking about emailher e, I made the point that each village has its own rules an...

  When HMRC announced a new IT system would be rolled out later than expected, it got the usual catcalls. It will take until 31 March 2023 for HMRC’s Customs Declaration Service to completely replace CHIEF (Customs Handling of Import Export Freight) as the UK’s  customs platform. But for once, I’ve got to say hats off HMRC.  When they started to replace CHIEF we were still part of Europe. Once Brexit was declared, they had to amend the Customs Declaration Service to take Brexit into account, even though the Government couldn’t make up its mind if, when and how we were leaving Europe. The fact that we’re only talking about late completion of CDS, when bits of it are already in place is a miracle. Just don’t expect the cost increase to be written on the side of a bus. In the past HMRC software projects had a pretty good reputation. When King and Crewe covered Information Technology in ‘The Blunders of Our Government’ (2013) they admitted that not all government IT schemes h...

 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 ...

 Yesterday, I caught up with some of the old crew from H.M Revenue and Customs. None of us got the last day at work we'd always imagined. The pandemic and working-from-home had put the icing on the cake of the satirically named 'Building Our Future' programme of office closures. Instead of handing in our building passes and spending the afternoon across the road in the Railwayman's Arms, we'd shut down our Surface Pro's and bid a socially distanced farewell to the IT contractor who called at our homes to pick them up.  It must have been a relief to some senior managers that most of the "dead men walking" have finally left. Over the past 10 years I've noticed that once an exit programme has started, those staff are "dead" as far as senior managers are concerned. If you get included in a meeting with them, there's a sense of "are you still here?" if you have to remind them which office you're from. Especially embarrassing ...

  "Refer to Policy" or "Why Can't You Answer My Question Quicker?" There comes a time in the life of every HM Revenue and Customs officer where he has to deal with Policy. There are - to say the least - several policy teams in HMRC, and the relationship between them and the ground staff is as constant as the British weather. I worked in two main areas of HMRC. As a compliance officer for Cream Tea Duty, and managing processing staff for Slap And Tickle Tax. Over the time, I got to see several different aspects of Policy.  As some accountants delight in reminding us, tax law is made by Parliament (or until recently, by the EU). One of Policy's jobs is to decide how that law can be put into practice in the real world. That could involve negotiation with trade bodies and the input of experienced compliance officers in Units of Expertise. The Units of Expertise aren't part of Policy as such, but bring practical experience, and take some of the weight off Po...

  I had to wait til Mid-day to check if the story was true. Appropriately, it was April 1st 2021 when the "i" Newspaper reported that Ministers are looking to "start bringing some civil servants back into the workplace under a phased return to the office from 12 April." We were assured this will only apply to "those whose roles are unsuited to working from home." As I said when talking about the early days of the lockdown  here   the definition of not being able to do your job remotely was always a bit ambiguous. It turned out that the technology allowed more people to work from home than we'd previously been led to believe. But some sections of HMRC doubted how effective that work from home was. Perhaps that was what the  Prime Minister was thinking of when he said "people have had quite a few days off" and should make a stab at going back to the office. "Fair play, we've given you that time off so you didn't spread Covid, but l...