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TW Ed wonders how long it will be before taxpayers are on an equal footing with HMRC.

Well, dear reader, I could not let the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech go unmarked. Thanks to the Internet, it is readily accessible and, for those who have not read or preferably watched it, I can only recommend they do. It is powerful, inspiring and magnificent. In short, world-changing. 

50 years on, we might well ask if we have lived up to King’s hortations. Two paragraphs in, the reader might well question the relevance to tax.  I admit none, although I might observe that as a device, taxation is for the most part a wonderful example of equality: the UK taxman is equally happy to take his share from anyone. It matters not even if you are dead: you are taxed ‘til the day you die, and then your estate is taxed for good measure! But if nothing else, the taxman is blind to race, colour, religion, sex, a pulse...* That much is good – laudable, even.

Nevertheless, in the nitty gritty, taxation brings its own inequalities, such as:

• Knowledge of / access to tax reliefs (which of course TW seeks to address)
• Wealth and income
• Mobility between regimes
• Access to digital services / broadband

A further inequality is the difference in approach to money you owe the taxman, and money which the taxman owes to you.  I started in an era when, if you informed HM Inspector that a repayment was due, he or she would immediately deal with any correspondence and notify you accordingly. Because it wasn’t their money.  I have more recently been met with complete indifference on numerous occasions: so what if they taxpayer wants a refund..? 

We are told of mysterious “ enhanced security checks” undertaken by an incommunicado office of HMRC which apparently answers to nobody – least of all the taxpayer – and seems woefully under-resourced, as it takes weeks, if not months, to clear selected repayments. One has to wonder if the apparent lack of resource is accidental.

What cannot be accidental is the disparity between the interest charged for late tax payment, (3% per annum), and that payable on refunds (0.5% per annum). I had always understood that interest was meant to serve only as compensation, so that neither party should be better or worse off for late payment, and it was the penalties alone which were meant to be punitive.

So why the 2.5% differential? Coupled with refunds at a snail’s pace, it must make for a nice earner for HMRC. Imagine the apoplexy if taxpayers were to propose equivalence in interest rates – their own penalties, even. Isn’t it strange that following the harmonisation of revenue and customs powers, etc., (for “harmonisation” read “enhancement”), one VAT treatment which did not get extended across all taxes was the 5% Repayment Supplement, for when HMRC is slow to repay VAT? 

If the reader has got this far, then he or she has hopefully forgiven the dissembling discursion from King to Orwell. Of course, there is an arguable link between tax and equality: education. So long as tax pays for a free and unbiased education for the majority, and there is free access to unbiased information, inequality should be recognised, wherever it resides, and in whatever form. In a democracy, it falls to the demos to decide what to do when they find it. Not my problem: having nearly defended or justified HMRC twice in a month, I shall turn back into a pumpkin.

Regards all,

TW Ed.

*OK, so maybe not everything  - there’s still Class 1B NIC, a special regime for ministers of religion, and Bereavement Allowance and independent taxation are not that old...