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The Provincial Tax Practitioner has some unpleasant experiences with ‘Chris’ from HM Revenue & Customs.

A Prophet of Doom called Chris

The annoying yet familiar ‘ping’ warned me of incoming: an email from Chris.

Chris? I don’t know a Chris. Was it yet another Viagra salesman masquerading as an acquaintance of mine? Apparently not. It purported to be from HMRC, but its source address was a bit too chummy for my liking, and I was on my guard after those spoof, tax refund emails. Closer inspection left me in no doubt that it had indeed originated from HMRC, as opposed to somewhere in Nigeria.

This chap Chris appeared to be some sort of HMRC soothsayer who, with all the mysterious obscurity of the Oracle at Delphi, was warning me of impending doom. Apparently the VAT authorisation code we had requested on behalf of a client had not been activated and, worse still, was about to expire: in 7 days.

Ye Gods, thank you Chris. Although obviously a wonderfully thoughtful and diligent chap, I couldn’t help thinking that he really ought to get a life. A working lifetime spent issuing warnings to agents is not a recipe for happiness.

Chris is Having a Bad Day 

Chris’s message was passed on to one of our staff who checked the Gateway. It appeared Chris was a having a bad day and was obviously all tuckered out from issuing warnings. We had in fact activated the code for this particular client.

Throughout the next week we had further similar messages from good old Chris, which we suitably ignored after confirming that the codes had indeed been activated. Chris must have been having some sort of breakdown.

HMRC’s Bombshell  

Then another missive from him arrived, informing us that because we had ignored the warning in his first email, the code for that particular client had unfortunately expired and we would have to ‘repeat the process by requesting a new authorisation code.’

Curiouser and Curiouser. Time to speak to Chris and put him straight.

All the messages reiterated that we could not reply to the email because it had been automatically generated: by Chris. So his breakdown could hardly be attributed to hard work. Perhaps all this automation had taken away his sense of purpose.

A call to the technical help line didn’t help much. They actually didn’t have anyone by the name of Chris who would take responsibility for the email. We found that difficult to believe; there must be hundreds of similarly named chaps in HMRC.

And then the technical guy dropped a bombshell.

Chris had been automatically and erroneously generating spurious emails whose dire warnings were completely without foundation. We should just ignore them.

But what about Chris? We could hardly ignore him. A renegade emailer was loose in HMRC. What else was he capable of? Would he escalate his warnings? Was our electricity supply at risk? What if he threatened to kidnap a family member?  Was he on emailing terms with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

Be Very Afraid 

Closer examination of the phantom emailer’s origins threw some light on the matter. These missives were coming from ChRIS. Is this strange mixture of lower case and upper case indicative of an abbreviation?

Acronyms are the bane of my life, especially those that are artificiality crafted to spell out a familiar and thoroughly dependable name: like ChRIS.

I suspect it stands for Computerised Human Resources Information System, but it really doesn’t matter. No human is involved. These emails are being generated by a computer with dubious software. As in the film I, Robot, which explored the aberrant behaviour of man-made machines, HMRC’s mainframe appears to be developing a mind of its own.

I suggest that in future HMRC uses ChRIS’s twin brother SaM to send out its emails. At least we would all then immediately recognise them for what they are: Senseless Automated Messages.