(Picture: Shobba: Truck and Driver Dec 2000) The sight of queues at petrol stations in September 2021 takes me back to September 2000 and the big fuel crisis.  It’s the same basic set-up. There’s no shortage of fuel being churned out by the refineries. It just can’t get into the service stations quick enough. The big difference is that in 2021 panic buying seems to have made what would have been a difficult situation much worse. There aren’t enough tanker drivers to supply all the petrol stations. But it wasn’t until news got out about the delivery problem that people started panic buying.  In 2000, the tanker drivers couldn’t even get out of the terminals because they were being blocked by farmers  lorry and taxi drivers protesting about fuel taxes. It always sticks in my mind because I’d bee...

 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...

  I was a bit stunned by reports of Priti Patel’s latest brainwave – to rewrite maritime law so that Border Force cutters can ‘pushback’ migrant boats, “when deemed practical and safe to do so”.   Stunned that she would try it, and stunned that it was being reported on the BBC website as changing the law to “allow” the Border Force to push back, as if it was something the officers on the vessels were anxious to do.  This could just be an aftershock from June when the Daily Mail headlined a story saying that Border Force cutters had entered French waters to pick up migrants. The Mail said it had a recording of a radio conversation between the Border Force and a French ship asking permission to cross into their territory and rescue the group (instead of waiting for the dinghy to drift into British waters). People smugglers cynically put immigrants in flimsy, overloaded boats, knowing that under the UN Convention of the Law at Sea there is a humanitarian obligation to s...

  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...

  A common sense suggestion to merge civil servants and council officers could be the start of cuts to local authorities. Baron Bichard, writing in the latest Civil Service World suggests scrapping distinctions between civil servants, council officers and NHS staff and creating a unified public service. The argument, on behalf of “the Commission for Smart Government” makes sense.  If you have one public service, it will smash the bureaucratic boxes which make it hard to solve real-life problems. Michael Bichard hints that last year’s PPE crisis would have had a happier ending if – instead of lots of agencies around the country – there had been just one public service. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/in-depth/article/time-to-end-the-great-divide-lets-scrap-distinctions-between-civil-servants-council-officers-and-nhs-staff And of course, Michael Bichard was the first chief executive of a county council to be put in charge of a government agency (the Benefits Agency).  So ...

 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 ...