What to do with an incompetent Department? Give them more power! At least, that's what HMRC thinks...
Over at City AM, Allister Heath has an extremely troubling column about how the privacy and indeed freedom of all UK taxpayers may be affected by the post-cock-up fallout of the HMRC's latest pathetic tax blunder.After disastrously miscalculating PAYE tax for millions of people, HMRC is apparently now lobbying for...
a gigantic power grab which could entirely redefine the relationship between the state, employees and their employers.
At present, PAYE income taxes are deducted by employers from their employees’ wages on a monthly basis. Under the most extreme of the proposals, companies would start handing over their entire salaries to the government, in the shape of a “central calculator” run by HMRC. The taxes would then be deducted by HMRC and the remaining amount would be paid by the taxman to employees. Incredibly, HMRC would suddenly become the largest payroll organisation in the world – it, rather than employers, would pay wages.
How do we hate this? Let us count the ways...
There could be huge costs to employers, who would have to invest heavily in staff and computer systems.
The real danger, however, is that HMRC is also thinking of forcing firms to hand over extra information to the authorities as part of this shift to real-time data. This is unacceptable for cost and privacy reasons. The Institute of Directors has highlighted some of the issues. Is pay frequency really needed? How can employers be expected to know about all third-party payments, in real time? Does the fact that some pay is for holidays matter for tax purposes?
There is yet one more suggestion - that hours worked should be recorded by the state. This would be another odiously authoritarian development. It is almost as if officials are deliberately seeking to kill off corporate Britain and to impose Soviet-style controls on taxpayers.
All in all - a very bad performance today, from a very bad Department.
By Alex Deane
This plan is also well bashed by Jill Kirby of the CPS, over at Centre Right
a gigantic power grab which could entirely redefine the relationship between the state, employees and their employers.
At present, PAYE income taxes are deducted by employers from their employees’ wages on a monthly basis. Under the most extreme of the proposals, companies would start handing over their entire salaries to the government, in the shape of a “central calculator” run by HMRC. The taxes would then be deducted by HMRC and the remaining amount would be paid by the taxman to employees. Incredibly, HMRC would suddenly become the largest payroll organisation in the world – it, rather than employers, would pay wages.
How do we hate this? Let us count the ways...
- Set-up costs: massive, with thousands of consultants, developers and others being hired; these IT projects are notoriously expensive, invariably go over budget and end up not working properly at all.
- Errors: massive numbers of errors would lead to money being paid over by employers but not reaching employees on the due day. The government's track record with large IT projects makes this a near-certainty. Imagine if 1m people suddenly didn’t receive their pay at the end of the month..
- Ongoing costs: HMRC would have to hire tens of thousands of staff – jobs currently undertaken by payroll or HR departments in private firms – merely to deal with queries, transferring these jobs from the private sector to the inefficient public sector - not only meaning we now all have to pay the wages of these people hitherto employed in the private sector, but making us all liable for their pensions to boot!
- More state control: the coalition is talks about decentralisation and localism. Centralising payroll in a government institution is an unbelievably absurd move in the opposite direction.
- Privacy - what privacy? Will everyone’s salary and taxation level be available online, given that all of the data would suddenly be in one place? Hackers would have a field day. It only needs to be lost once - and once it's lost, it's gone for good. Just ask the 25 million people whose personal details were on the child benefit database, lost in 2006.
There could be huge costs to employers, who would have to invest heavily in staff and computer systems.
The real danger, however, is that HMRC is also thinking of forcing firms to hand over extra information to the authorities as part of this shift to real-time data. This is unacceptable for cost and privacy reasons. The Institute of Directors has highlighted some of the issues. Is pay frequency really needed? How can employers be expected to know about all third-party payments, in real time? Does the fact that some pay is for holidays matter for tax purposes?
There is yet one more suggestion - that hours worked should be recorded by the state. This would be another odiously authoritarian development. It is almost as if officials are deliberately seeking to kill off corporate Britain and to impose Soviet-style controls on taxpayers.
All in all - a very bad performance today, from a very bad Department.
By Alex Deane
This plan is also well bashed by Jill Kirby of the CPS, over at Centre Right
Now tax inspectors get police powers
Coming in the week that HMRC was forced to admit that 1.4 million people will need to pay back underpaid tax, it is perhaps not surprising that the Daily Telegraph has found that the taxman has been given superior snooping powers: The inspectors can now turn up at people’s homes or businesses unannounced and examine their records if they believe not enough tax has been paid.
The scale of the new powers for tax inspectors, which were first introduced last year under the Finance Act 2008, have only become apparent after HMRC started to publish redacted versions of their training manuals on the internet.
Gary Ashford, head of tax risk, disputes and investigations at accountancy firm RSM Tenon, said that the powers under civil law made the inspectors more powerful than the police. So far hundreds of people are thought to have been subject to the intrusive unannounced checks.
It is a worrying trend in this new Parliament that - if money is involved, the privacy concerns can be ignored (whereas in the last it was all about 'Terror'). Only a few weeks ago we were fighting the Government on plans to allow credit reference agencies the power to snoop on people's finances.
For an administration that promised so much on privacy, they should remember not to throw the baby out with the bath water when trying to cut the defecit.
By Dylan Sharpe
The scale of the new powers for tax inspectors, which were first introduced last year under the Finance Act 2008, have only become apparent after HMRC started to publish redacted versions of their training manuals on the internet.
Gary Ashford, head of tax risk, disputes and investigations at accountancy firm RSM Tenon, said that the powers under civil law made the inspectors more powerful than the police. So far hundreds of people are thought to have been subject to the intrusive unannounced checks.
It is a worrying trend in this new Parliament that - if money is involved, the privacy concerns can be ignored (whereas in the last it was all about 'Terror'). Only a few weeks ago we were fighting the Government on plans to allow credit reference agencies the power to snoop on people's finances.
For an administration that promised so much on privacy, they should remember not to throw the baby out with the bath water when trying to cut the defecit.
By Dylan Sharpe
