Proposed Revenue tax collection powers

In the same week as the National Audit Office reports that HM Revenue & Customs fails to calculate accurately the tax liabilities of over 1M taxpayers (with the net inaccuracy being in favour of the Revenue; who would have guessed !), the Revenue publish a consultation paper in which the Revenue seeks to extend its collection powers for unpaid tax. The ramifications of some of the proposals are chilling, and especially for those taxpayers who are less familiar with the system or those who are cannot afford professional representation, many of whom have already had their lives blighted by the combined rank incompetence of the legislature and the Revenue when implementing and administering the tax credits system.  

The powers being sought by the Revenue include, inter alia, the powers to distrain goods, freeze bank accounts and collect tax via employers by means of a direct deduction from an individual's wages, and all without the approval beforehand of the courts.

Now, there is no denying that there are recalcitrant individuals who properly owe tax which they choose do not pay and who deserve no sympathy for the behaviour they choose to display.

There are, however, a good number of others who do not properly owe tax in law but are held to do so, in practice, because the Revenue say so and these individuals, when faced with the oppressive machine that is the Revenue, are simply not possessed of the resources needed to fight their corner. One supposes that many of these same people are those who currently find themselves the subject of the some 200,000 court orders sought annually by the Revenue for unpaid taxes and which, snidely, the Revenue suggests are unnecessary because the large majority of the claims by the Revenue are undefended. No mention, of course, by the Revenue that the court orders may be uncontested merely because the individuals concerned have long since been beaten into submission by a system which is too complicated for them to understand (not to mention too complicated for the so many poorly trained and put upon junior Revenue officials to understand either).

The Revenue rightly say, albeit probably reluctantly, that their powers should be subject to safeguards. But, yet, we already have a safeguard admired throughout the world for the quality of its intellect, independence and integrity and otherwise called the judiciary; the only public body in which, according to a recent Economist survey, public confidence has increased during recent years.

Let us hope that a report issued on the first day of the current premiership counts as a final embarrassing hurrah of the old regime and is not an indication of the new broom that we all hope to be seeing over the months ahead. Perhaps the time and money invested in this, and so much more ill thought out policy over the past decade, can now be better directed to improving the tax system, with a good start being a reduction in the Revenue's 1m incorrect calculations.