How to make £90million in a month!

Halfhidden

Untouchable
Administrator
HM Revenue and Customs are streamlining their department so that they work more efficiently... Yet if you are self assessment you'll likely get a fine this year if you got your returns in on time or not.
I say that because I'm sitting here looking at those fines right now. Every day the postman came he delivered yet another fine from HM Customs and Revenue for 5 days.
So how did Sparky and I get £500's worth of fines?

Well it all seems to have started with the big shake up that was imposed on the tax office from the government. It meant that the tax office had to be more cost effective and that meant another super muck up at the tax payers expense.
It's complicated enough making a tax return. But when you own a non profit organisation, and are a member in a partnership business as well as having a sole trader status we fall into several tax brackets:
Corporation tax
Partnership
Sole Trader
Anyway. The tax office changed the way we use to do our returns. It always was a choice for the company to do a return either at the end of their financial year or the HM Revenue and Customs year end (April 4). Now it has to be by the end of October (if filing by hand) or the end of January if you file online.

OK I guess most of you know this by now.
Well what the tax payer suspected, whilst the tax office said it wouldn't... was that the new system wasn't anything like ready. In fact it collapsed several times as it couldn't cope with the sudden influx of millions of businesses filing returns all at once. The official response from HM Revenue was that the system experienced some slowness from time to time. In short this prevented an awful lot of businesses from filing their returns on time.

Ringing HM Revenue is a nightmare. On all of their correspondence they quote the helpline number as 0845 366 7807 yet this number is obsolete. Phoning them is a test of nerves as I've never every time I've called I've been on hold for at least 45 mins without exception. On two occasions I got a recorded message telling me that they can't cope with the volume of calls and then cut me off!!

We were encouraged to file our partnership returns on line and later discovered that you can't actually file partnerships on line despite the fact that there is a section on their website for filing partnerships.

It took us weeks and several phone calls to get our UTR's (Unique Tax Reference Numbers) so long in fact that we missed the October deadline.
Phoning up for some advise we we told that we could file our partnership returns on line after all. To do so we needed to apply for a government gateway number. Well weeks passed by and nothing turned up. More phone calls later and we are told that the last advise was incorrect, you can't file partnerships on line but they did recognise that there is a section for this on the HM Revenue site.
Completely confused now I phone again and was told to file online. This time I insist that the operator stays online whilst I do so. I start the form and fill in all the questions and get to the very end of the online form only to be informed that I cannot file online as it was a partnership. Ah said the operator... you can if you buy Sage Line 100 and subscribe to the HM revenue site at £11,000!

So I sent the returns back to the accountant to file for me. She put a note in explaining what had happened.
They fined me and Sparky anyway.

Too add insult to injury they changed my UTR (which is meant to stay with you for life) and then fined me because they made an error.

According to a report in the Telegraph HM Revenue and Customs generated £90million in fines alone this year!

And I though banks were bad lol lol

Wish us luck as we have two more returns to go through yet ::14:
 

Halfhidden

Untouchable
Administrator
Jolly exciting stuff! got post early this morning and I wondered why the postman was so happy! Well perhaps that's because he was delivering yet another fine from HM Revenue and Customs. This time it is a £200 fine!
Now I owe £700 for the mistakes they have made!
 

Halfhidden

Untouchable
Administrator
Yes it was because you posted a comment about tooth fairies. This isn't what the topic was about.
 
Top Bottom