Ideas to Reform CIS (further to Dave's great invite.....)

Stand for election as a Commissioner and I will vote for you

How about a legal obligation on HMRC to issue any fines within 1 month of the submission date?  After all, the taxpayer has only 31 days to appeal against them.

Every time anyone calls a helpline which ends up saying "sorry we can't be arsed speaking to you" and then cuts you off, I'd have a legal obligation on them to give a £10 credit to the UTR of the phone number of the taxpayer or agent making the call.

Make it mandatory for HMRC to accept e-mail enquiries and appeals if they can't be arsed to put enough staff on the phone lines such that EVERY CALL gets through to an advisor within 10 minutes.

The days when CIS was needed are long gone. As all subbies and main contractors have to be registered with HMRC there is no need for all the other palaver. CIS was originally conceived to stop the abuse within the construction industry and it has done a good job. Then of course Mr Brown and co started to get greedy and the rest is history.

Isn't it wierd. You can amend a P35 or tax return on line but not a cis return. 

I thought it was quite good that you can do amendments over the phone till I tried for my client. He'd not seen the status declaration box so hadn't ticked it -for the last 36 months! I had to do paper amendments and that green ink is hard to read after 2 or 3. I've since been told that we still face penalties even though the amended returns have been accepted by HMRC. What was the point?