Hmrc

‘I’d like my money back please’ was what I was waiting to tell British Gas, if they ever stopped the deafening rock music of their recorded hold message to answer the phone. My account was £490 in credit, like it was a savings account. Only it wasn’t a savings account for me, and now energy prices are going up beyond all reason, I’m not going to be so relaxed about these matters. I want my 500 quid back. They have been over-estimating my usage for too long, despite me diligently giving them my meter readings. The £2,500 cap announced by the Prime Minister doesn’t mean a damn for me, because

Given that I know about as much about Lewis Hamilton’s tax affairs as I do about Formula One motor racing it would be unwise for me to be churlish about his knighthood, announced in the New Year Honours list. For all I know, he could be making generous voluntary donations to HMRC. A few weeks ago, it was reported that his tax status was being vetted by the Palace, and it doesn’t appear to have prevented his name appearing on the honours list. Then again, it is hard to escape a suspicion that the big attraction for his decision to live in Monaco might just possibly have been the modesty

Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a citizen’s duty, not an act of virtue. But for the very rich it is also a choice, since with the help of expensive advisers they can duck it or pay very little of it by using complex avoidance devices and offshore havens. So if they stay onshore and pay up, we should salute their good citizenship — if only to encourage others like them who might lighten the tax burden for the rest of us. In that context I was pleased to see two of this column’s controversial heroes of

You’ve just had a baby. Life is upside down, but in a good way. A couple of months in, you are talking to your antenatal group and someone mentions child benefit. It’s not something you’d have thought you’d be eligible for, as you and your partner earn too much to get any benefits, as a rule. You go to the HMRC website, fill out the form and get a letter back. ‘I am writing to tell you that you are entitled to child benefit at £20.70 a week’, it begins. ‘Brill, that will pay for the nappies’, you think. So you take it and you are £1,076.40 a year to

Financial scams are big business in the UK. A report from Experian last year suggested that fraud could cost the UK economy as much as £193 billion a year – though these scams come in many shapes and sizes. Analysis from Which suggests there were around 264,000 reported cases of fraud last year. This, however, is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Barely a week goes by without reports of a new scam, whether it’s sudden demands to pay for the use of WhatsApp, suspicious emails supposedly from our bank, or fake ticket-selling websites. And, of course, these stories are accompanied by all sorts of advice on how to

Not since the days of William Hogarth has Mother’s Ruin featured so prominently in the national consciousness. In the 21st century, gin is seriously big business as evidenced by the slew of pop-up bars and festivals devoted to this elixir of the gods as well as the number of bottles weighing down supermarket shelves. Just this week Sainbury’s launched two new gins aimed at connoisseurs while Lidl continues to sell inordinate amounts of its award-winning tipple. Now the juniper-flavoured favourite has reached another milestone. Figures from HM Revenue & Customs reveal that sales of gin have helped spirits overtake beer for the first time. The Treasury earned an extra £225

A record number of people are now paying the highest rate of tax thanks to wage inflation and the reduction in pensions tax relief. That’s according to figures from HM Revenue & Customs. While the proportion of people paying the 45 per cent additional rate is still small compared to the overall number of income tax payers (just 1.2 per cent), it is nonetheless a 10 per cent increase on the previous year. It also represents a 54 per cent rise since the tax band was introduced. HMRC says that, by the end of this financial year, an estimated 364,000 people will be paying the 45p rate of tax on income

There’s a saying that when you tax something, you get less of it. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The government taxes smoking, alcohol, and petrol partly because we think these things have costly side-effects—like pollution or burdening the NHS—that we want to discourage. But most of our taxes do not fall on activities with costly side-effects: they fall on things like working, travelling, and socialising. And because we have such a high tax burden—this year we’ll work for the chancellor for 154 days before we start working for ourselves on Tax Freedom Day, today—we almost certainly have less of those things. With lower taxes we’d be happier, and our

Pity the taxman. As reviled professions go, it’s up there with estate agents, traffic wardens and, er, journalists. Now comes the news that more than three million people may have paid the wrong tax after chaos at HM Revenue & Customs left callers waiting for over an hour to speak to staff last year. In a stinging report, the National Audit Office said that the quality of service at HMRC ‘collapsed’ over an 18-month period between 2014 and 2015. Call waiting times tripled during that time, as some customers were kept on hold for up to an hour. One in five callers – 4.2 million people – hung up after waiting an average of

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs is unlikely to be your favourite government department. But you have to pity the poor bean counters. It can’t be fun spending all day sending brown envelopes across the country in the hope of collecting enough tax to save the Chancellor’s blushes on Budget day. But now the tax office has gone too far in its pursuit of our money. Last week it emerged that grieving families had been sent demands to pay tax on inherited pensions. You might think that sounds entirely reasonable – after all, we’ve all heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous adage that death and taxes are the only certain things in life. However, in this case the rule

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or follow us on SoundCloud. After the row over tax returns, are political scandals not what they used to be? Richard Littlejohn asks in his Spectator cover piece this week whether we’ve come a long way from the days of Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair. Have we forgotten what a scandal is really about? Isabel Hardman is joined by Matthew Parris, author of Great Parliamentary Scandals, to discuss. As he puts it:- For quite a long time, sex was very delicious. I think we’re beginning to find tax and financial matters delicious too.’ Also on the Spectator podcast, Political Editor James

As someone who still entertains hope of becoming a member of Parliament one day, I’d better come clean about my own tax affairs. It’s a torrid tale, as you’d expect, but rather than wait for my political opponents to winkle the story out of me bit by bit, I thought I’d get it all out in the open. I blame the Cub Scouts for starting me on the wrong path. As a boy of eight, I was an eager participant in bob-a-job week, which involved going from door to door on my street offering to do odd jobs. I turned all the money over to my Cub pack, but I