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 Collectors was a BBC1 series which ran for 10 episodes on Saturday evenings from March to May 1986. Unlike, The Revenue Men, it focussed on the uniformed HM Customs and Excise staff based at the Custom House in a small port called Welling (filmed at Poole). Peter McEnery starred as Harry Caines, the new Surveyor at Welling District, drafted in from Heathrow Airport to sharpen up performance. “Chumminess is a thing of the past,” he warns his staff. Created by Welsh writer, Ewart Alexander (Kings Royal, Juliet Bravo) the series featured a cross-section of characters. Michael Billington (UFO, The Onedin Line) played Tom Gibbons, a Higher Executive Officer, resentful at being passed over for the Surveyor’s job and placating a rich and spoilt young wife (Karen Drury, later of Brookside). Jack McKenzie played bearded HEO Calvin Simpson, never happier than when aboard his Customs launch, The Seal. Lois Butlin (Grange Hill) was Alyson Bentley , horse riding, fast-driving Executive Of...

 CONFESSIONS OF A VAT INSPECTOR by Dawn Fallon (ISBN 9 798445 671640) If the title makes you expect Liz Fraser and Robin Asquith having a clothing malfunction while arguing over tax points you’ll be disappointed. But Dawn Fallon’s CONFESSIONS OF A VAT INSPECTOR does give a lively account of what it was like to be a VAT Control Officer in HM Customs and Excise from 1986 to 1995.  While some of the detail of the pre-computer era may surprise a modern day HM Revenue and Customs VAT officer, they will probably feel a shock of recognition at most of Dawn’s experiences. She vividly captures the despair of sitting in a traders premises and realising that none of it matches what you were told in training. Another abiding truth is the pay. In May 2024 Jim Harra told the Public Accounts Committee that almost a third of HMRC staff had to be given a pay increase to ensure the department complied with the National Living Wage. Back in the 1980’s, Dawn is forced to take on extra work (as a ...

  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...

 Coming back from my world cruise on the S.S. Happy Wanderer, I told myself that my knowledge of HM Revenue and Customs was now far too time-expired (our "out of date" as we used to say). But setting foot on English shores once more, I soon found that the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg were still trotting out the same old prejudices about civil servants, productivity and working from home. That's one good thing about starting from a base of no knowledge. It can never go out of date.  According to The Times of 10 January, MP's such as Harriet Baldwin of the Treasury committee have written to Jim Harra ( head of HMRC) after helplines were shut down last month due to IT problems. Despite being told that the shutdown was due to "a botched upgrade", the MP's still want to know , "if its working from home policy has caused a decline in its customer service helpline." Of course, Jim Harra will give them an answer. And they probably won't be satisfied wi...

  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...

Fed up of waiting for a reply? Not satisfied with the service you got? Will making a complaint solve your problem? It might do, IF your complaint is about something that can be fixed. But, the more punters complain, the more it takes people away from their day-to-day work.  It might be that complaints are over-rated. Punters who get their problems fixed by complaining are more likely to recommend it as a solution. But, from what I remember, for every complaint where there was a problem that could be solved, there was another where the only answer was that HRMC had done everything right. You may not like the way it was done, but if it was done within the rules, that was the end of it. (Hand on heart, when I worked for Large Business , I don't recall any complaints. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe it was because each business had a Customer Relationship Manager they could ring up to talk things over with. Maybe that sounds unfair.  Maybe the man in the street could do with having so...

 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...

 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've been reading through the Institute for Government's new report on Finding The Right Skills for the Civil Service and had a few random thoughts.  The report has a "ripped from the headlines" recommendation about "porosity" (expertise moving between the Civil Service and the Private Sector). It says ACOBA is the gatekeeper that limits ‘revolving door’ abuse of government insider knowledge "(but)...there are.no firm sanctions for those who break the rules, and those who follow them are unlikely to be the people behaving improperly. " So,"...the system needs a thorough overhaul." As I said here , it's clear the problem lies on the top shelf of the oven, and I hope any remedies don't end up dripping down to the bottom levels. As far as the findings on skills goes, I still felt a bit of residual pride that HMRC is identified as a bit of a leader here with a large number of civil servants who are members of a profession that in...

 Call me suspicious, but as sure as slurry runs downhill, I suspect the current row over Greensill and second jobs for civil servants will eventually end up having the biggest impact on those at the bottom of the oven. The current row started with a former head of Whitehall procurement being revealed to have a "second job" with Greensill Capital. As a result the head of the civil service has ordered Government departments to tell him how many other civil servants have second jobs. I assume the Cabinet Secretary is just interested in "top" civil servants - senior managers with the knowledge and connections to benefit private enterprise. I really hope this isn't going to be the start of a grand campaign that blusters down to the lowest levels of the civil service. At the lower grades, some civil servants are so poorly paid that - before the pandemic - they felt the need to take a second job. Others are involved with family businesses and do a bit of work at weeken...

  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...