As I've said before - one of the things I liked about working for HM Customs and Excise was that it wasn't like being a boring civil servant. Even after the merger with the Inland Revenue to form HM Revenue and Customs - and despite the "One Civil Service" programme - there was still enough DIVERSITY in the job to make it fun. One example could be found in section 63 (1) of the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979 (and here, I have to admit that I didn't discover it myself, it was pointed out by retired Preventive Officer Ray Gregory in the Customs and Excise History Network newsletter no 31 in Spring 2012). This is the section which tells the ship's master to deliver an outward entry before any export goods are loaded - "other than goods for exportation loaded in accordance with a stiffening order issued by the proper officer.." Isn't that grand? A stiffening order . As far as I can tell that means an order to strengthen the hull of a vess...

 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...

  "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'...

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*. ...