How far will I go?

Demo at HMRC HQ: 26 Jan 2010

I’m a natural introvert so standing in front of a building full of the most powerful people in the country with a large placard is – frankly – absurd. The first five minutes are fearful, will I be asked to move on? Will I be threatened with arrest? The remaining two hours are just dull and very cold. I am – truly – a reluctant protester.

What I’m asking is also absurd: logging case hours is standard commercial practice in the real world. The system makes it easy to assess case costs so at any point a manager can assess how lucrative his team’s work is.

“You’ve got X cases where you’ve logged up Y hours and none of them have an expected outcome of more than Z! Sort it out.”

HMRC spends too much time investigating cases that are simply not lucrative enough, they do this to ‘ensure the integrity of the system’ but I would argue that the primary job of HMRC is to bring cash in for our – frankly – strapped government.

According to HMRC figures every one of your tax £1s yields a £2 result from a Self Assessment investigation. And you think: well they must be doing a good job then, but the reality is that if they started frying bigger fish – rather then boiling small potatoes – they could be getting figures as high as £70 for every £1 spent.

Ten minutes into the demo, Mike from Poland took my picture for his art project and asked if I was on a political demonstration, I said that it was more administrative than political which left him confused, he’s not the only one to be left feeling puzzled by the way things are at HMRC.