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In the second article of the series, a partner in a provincial firm of accountants explains how poor punctuation by HMRC can cause problems with tax refunds.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Lyn Truss’s best selling book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, extolled the importance of correct punctuation, but as far as HMRC is concerned it seems to matter not one jot; particularly when they send confirmation that a tax repayment is being made to our ‘client’s account’.

Wonderful news for the client: a long awaited refund is now sitting in his bank account and available for immediate withdrawal to blow on a well-deserved holiday. We file the confirmation and congratulate ourselves on a job well done and another satisfied customer.

Wrong.

The far-from-satisfied client rings up some time later to ask where his repayment is, and in a tone suggestive of his suspicion that we have pocketed the refund and squandered it on red wine and stilton.

Where is the Tax Refund?

After assuring him that no such refund has hit our clients’ account (note the position of the apostrophe) his file is fished out. 

‘The boy’s a fool,’ we cry, confident in HMRC’s affirmation that the refund had indeed been sent to our ‘client’s (bank) account i.e., the account belonging to this particular client.

Better just check though. We don’t trust these new-fangled electronic transfers and it may just be HMRC has transferred it into a cyberspace wormhole.

Up on screen appears the bank account we have so generously dedicated to clients’ refunds (once again, note the apostrophe; just to confuse matters further, the bank has designated it ‘client account.’) There on screen is an amount that looks suspiciously like the missing refund, but just to add to our stress levels the only reference is an SA UTR number. We fire up the tax software. A search of the database reveals the client’s name.

Fearing the onset of an alcohol- and cheese-induced early dementia, HMRC’s missive is checked again.

It definitely and categorically assures us that the funds have been transferred into our ‘client’s account’.

Now the plural of "client" is "clients"; always was, always will be. The plural possessive is clients’.

HMRC Overlooks Payment Instructions

Ratcheting the frustration up a couple of notches is another tax refund, that we have requested to be repaid to us, because without it, we suspect we shall have to go whistle for our fee. So when the Revenue confirmation wings its way to us stating repayment has been paid to our client’s account, we take no notice of the apostrophe. After all, if its fluid positioning is good enough for HMRC, it’s good enough for us. Anyway, our file copy of the SA return confirms that we have completed the section authorising the refund to be repaid directly to us. We therefore assume it has been deposited in our clients’/client account and we issue a cheque to the client minus our outstanding fees.

Wrong again.

A phone call from the client quickly follows, the tone of which suggests that our systems leave much to be desired and our fees are obviously far too high if we can afford to repay tax that has already been repaid to him by HMRC.

We still haven’t stopped snapping pencils in two whenever we recall the time HMRC’s cavalier attitude to the designated recipient of the refund cost us several hundred pounds. Once again they completely ignored our instructions, both on the tax return and in a telephone call, to repay the overpayment to us; they repaid the client, who happened to be a contractor in the construction industry. It was just doubly unfortunate for us that this chap was the spitting image of that seven foot giant Russian pugilist, Nikolai Valuev, and his idea of a good night out was to consume several pints, and then see how far into the next county he could hurl street lamps and vertically-challenged passers-by. 

Sometimes a bad debt write-off is the better part of valour. Fortunately, our sense of cowardice was assuaged by this client’s immediate and permanent disappearance to sunnier climes, probably to wrestle bulls for fun.     

We have now taken to subjecting HMRC’s text to a clause by clause, grammatical analysis. And then we completely ignore it and check our clients’ account online.

We have discovered that in some instances HMRC attempts to avoid the dreaded apostrophe by stating that a repayment has been made ‘direct to your client.’ [ Er, shouldn't that be directly? - Ed, happily getting on the act ]. But only sometimes, and can we believe it anyway?

Hell’s bells it’s not too much to ask, is it, that attention is paid to punctuation?

Or should that be hells’ bells, or maybe hells’ bell’s’ or…?