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...

  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...

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*. ...