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Who’s minding the shop?

3rd Sep 2013
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It’s more than a year now since Dave Hartnett (and Stephen Banyard and Mike Eland and Naomi Ferguson) left HMRC. So who’s minding the shop now and where’s the expertise (and has life got any better in the HMRC gulag?) asks Simon Sweetman.

Every link on the HMRC front page now seems to lead to the “most wanted” list. When what I was looking for was the current management at HMRC, this came as something of a shock. They are in fact different.

What we have now is executive and non-executive board members (you have to use the language of private business these days, whether appropriate or not).

Chief executive is still Lin Homer, who seems to have outlived the nonsense of being in charge of border controls. She has of course no tax background. Ian Barlow is the deputy and has lots of tax experience, admittedly with KPMG. His biography on gov.uk lists nine other interests in business, charities etc. So he’s not quite full time and knows tax well enough. But his career has been with one of the great tax avoidance advisers. Can the leopard have changed his spots, especially when he has little to no involvement with the day-to-day work of the department?

Edward Troup is the tax assurance secretary, a job which appears to involve making sure no taxpayers are harmed in the making of assessments. Edward is a long term Treasury man of deep and subtle experience, but not a hands-on taxperson.

Simon Bowles, the chief finance officer, has Arthur Andersen in his history. Enough said.

Jennie Grainger joined in 2012 from the Australian Tax office (the UK has borrowed several ideas from Australia in recent years, so might as well borrow their staff as well). Jim Harra has been round and about within HMRC since joining in 1984, but is a long-term taxman. Ruth Owen is a career civil servant with experience of running “large-scale customer service operations” from Jobcentre Plus and DWP.

Then we have the non-executives. Volker Becker was formerly chief executive of RWE npower. Edwina Dunn is a co-founder of a business dealing in data mining and analysis, a key, it says, to the introduction of the Tesco clubcard (which is one strike against her, I suppose). Colin Cobain is a “highly successful” chief information officer, having been one such for Tesco. Philippa Hird is interested in remuneration and governance. Norman Pickavance is an HR man, lately with Morrisons.

All of this makes it clear that the government sees supermarkets as better models for HMRC than the old Inland Revenue.

There has been chatter (on the sort of places I go) about the ‘spirit of cricket’ (or mainly about transgressions thereof). There is little chatter here about the spirit of public service, probably because successive governments from Thatcher onwards have done their best to break it by criticising public servants who can’t respond and by constantly worsening their conditions of service.

So what about the workers? In my day they were motivated and on the whole keen to be helpful, and were usually treated as human beings rather than as maze-running rats in a call centre.

But that, alas, is not modern management-think.

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By Ken of Chester le Street
06th Sep 2013 15:21

An Inspector by name

Tragic, Simon! Every time I look on the website I give thanks that I am retired!

 

When I was first in practice, there were tax inspectors, you knew their names, you spoke to them on the phone and argued points, you knew their personalities, we knew the sheep from the goats and so did they.   Moreover, they knew your clients.  and the really amazing thing, they knew about tax. You could ring them up, speak to an inspector and find out the Revenue view of a topic, (Or, I'll be honest, what some piece of law actually meant). They understood the law, they knew direct tax  was based on statutes and precedents, concessions  and materiatlity.  There were tax districts, with names like Durham, St Austell, Southampton 1, 2, 3,4 and 5, Alnwick, Whitehaven etc.  They even wrote letters, I mean letters,not proformas with dialogue boxes to complete resulting in a "letter" with contradictory paragraphs, probably unsigned.  

When did the rot set in? Was it self-assessment? Did it start with independant taxation? Or was it when someone decided to merge the Inland Revenue with Customs and Excise? I suspect the latter. The Inland Revenue, for all their fault, had the concept of  statutes being capable of more than one interpretation,  of honest differences of opinion, and innocent error (non-culpable tax comes to mind.)  . Customs and excise had a philosophy dating back to hunting for smugglers, there was no avoidance only evasion, and no innocent errors. Fewer statutes and more statutory instruments, VAT notices having the force of law.  The two did not marry happily.

There were of course intransigent Inspectors, delays,  bullying tactics.  But 30 years ago one was dealing with professionals. It still happens sometimes, I had a protracted  debate in 2008  with an Inspector involving a series of letters and a site meeting, it was fun for everyone except the client, because it was purely about capital allowances (whether a professor "needed " a library, a question which should have been obvious to everyone except a law lord in the nineteenth century),  and we finally agreed he needed about 80% of it, and he accepted only one year needed adjustment because we had made full disclosure in earlier years).

. So what about the workers? In my day they were motivated and on the whole keen to be helpful, and were usually treated as human beings rather than as maze-running rats in a call centre. The ones I spoke to were almost invariably helpful,  but never the same one, and only understanding their little bit of the tax spectrum, rather like rail enquiry call centre workers who have never actually been on a train. How decent people manage to serve the taxpayer courteously and humanely is a mystery to me, but they do!   

 

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By Anita Houlson
28th Sep 2013 16:22

Secrets

I am sorry but the rot goes further back than self-asessment. Think back to 1995 and the issue of Equitable Liability. Secrecy and underhanded behaviour emerged prior to that date.Sadly no lessons were learnt. Canker tends to spread, unless treated! Having cut my teeth with a nationalised industry in relation to customer service I believe that good service is down to good old staff training designed to give job satisfaction as well happy clients But you need the expertise of a good trainer who knows the job or you get, quote;'maze runing rats', with absolutely no direction!

!

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