Why Dave Hartnett must go

The PAYE fiasco of recent days will, hopefully, bring to a much wider audience not only some of the manifold deficiencies within the UK tax system but, moreover, the reasons why.  

Chief among these is the culture of arrogance that has  spread within HM Revenue & Customs in recent years since Dave Hartnett became its operational head. This is the culture that says HMRC are untouchable and unaccountable.  HMRC not only now hold themselves out as unelected law makers, and are seemingly content to usurp the supremacy of parliament when so acting, but the continued absence of the imposition by the courts of a general duty of care on HMRC has given HMRC a free hand to act without fear of having to compensate those that suffer through HMRC incompetence and worse besides. 

Those of us working within the sector have long seen the adoption by HMRC of such dubious practices as withholding refunds due to taxpayers, painting taxpayers with dawn raids, judge shopping and deliberately misleading the courts, but HMRC have been able to rely on this mentality not reaching a wider audience.  Not so with PAYE maladministration; that is most definitely a matter to which the layperson can relate.

Over this past weekend, and with the PAYE story coming to the fore in the national press, it came as no surprise to experts that Dave Hartnett saw no reason to apologise to the plebs for the shortcomings of HMRC.  This is the attitude of a career long civil servant who thinks he, his £160K salary, copper bottomed pension and generous, if not moody, expenses, are all untouchable.  That he was forced to change his tune and to apologise must have grated. Good.

Personally, if any worthwhile change for the better is to come out of this debacle, I would prefer for the imposition of a statutory duty of care on HMRC but there is, regrettably, no realisitic prospect of that happening.  A more even handed, and statute based, Taxpayers' Charter, perhaps ? But even that would be an overly optimistic expectation.

I will, therefore, settle for Hartnett being sacked and the message that this will send to others.  This would, I believe, be a task falling to David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. Representations to Mr Gauke can be made here.