HMRC and the great debt write-off

HMRC continues to write off debt

The taxman has lost out on £27.4billion over the past five years because of the shambles at HM Revenue & Customs, a report reveals. The economic downturn combined with an over-complicated tax code has left the troubled body unable to collect the money. The total is equivalent to £200 per year for each household in the country.

The study concluded that if all last year’s written-off tax of £5.9billion had been collected, it would amount to more than 1 per cent off standard VAT. Despite the alarming figures uncovered by the TaxPayers’ Alliance and, say the Institute of Directors, the situation is getting worse as last year, the amount of uncollected income tax was £1.35billion, which was 52 per cent higher than in 2006/07.

MPs found last month that HMRC was in deep crisis, citing ‘endemic delays’ and staff so overstretched that more than half of calls go unanswered. Letters are ignored for months. Now it has emerged that despite pledges to tackle underpayment, the tax office has been forced to write off massive unpaid bills. HMRC lost out most on VAT, writing off nearly £2billion in the last financial year alone. Missing out on corporation tax, capital gains tax and national insurance as well as losses on alcohol and tobacco duties, and tax credits contributed to the total. Worse still, there is a claim in Richard Murphy’s article below that “it is quite reasonable to presume that the total losses to tax evasion […] amount to at least £70 billion” (a year). The document can be accessed at the foot of this article.

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘We need systematic reform to produce a simpler tax code. Some of this uncollected tax will be down to the recession but there is clearly a long-term problem as well. Tax shouldn’t be so taxing that even HMRC can’t keep on top of it.’ The report said: ‘The system is far too complicated. The tax code has grown massively. ‘The handbooks of tax legislation have sharply increased in length, indicating more and more complexity. Tolley’s Corporation Tax guide is 1,897 pages long. ‘The tax code is so long that it would take Steve Woodmore, the world’s fastest speaker, over five days straight to get through it.’

Remissions are one of two ways in which HMRC gives up trying to collect unpaid tax. They are debts capable of recovery but not pursued on grounds of cost or because of a tax office error. The second, write-offs, are debts with no practical means of recovery, such as from a firm which has gone out of business.

A spokesman for HMRC said: ‘We collect 99 per cent of debt that we are able to. Ninety per cent of money owed that is written off is caused by company liquidations.’

Note the words “that we are able to“. That says it all.

See this article on Universal Credit and the problems that lie ahead

Download this article on tax evasion by Richard Murphy FCA: rm_tax_justice_report_-_july_2010

Another black man is about to be executed in America …

The figures are staggering. More people are imprisoned in the United States than anywhere else in the world. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Incarceration_rates_worldwide.gif. There’s no escaping it. To make matters worse, the formidable prison population comprises over 45% black ethnic minority.  One in nine black American are in prison. More blacks and Latinos are executed than white people.

Estimated number of inmates held in custody in state or federal prison, or in local jails,by sex, race, and Hispanic origin, June 30, 2009.
	Male				Female
Year	Total	White	Black	Hispanic	Total	White	Black	Hispanic
2009	2,096,300	693,800	841,000	442,000	201,200	92,100	64,800	32,300
Note: Detailed categories exclude persons who reported two or more races. All totals include persons under age 18.

Tonight, one of those men, a black American, is due to be executed by lethal injection. The scheduled execution in Georgia is due to take place at 7pm (midnight GMT). Troy Davis 42, was refused a request to take a polygraph test in a bid to prove his innocence and will now face execution. His legal team also filed a last-minute appeal questioning ballistics evidence against him but that was turned down by the state’s pardons board. Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer who was working as a security guard in Savannah, Georgia.

Mr MacPhail was shot dead when he rushed to help a homeless man who was being pistol whipped in a Burger King car park in an argument over a beer. Witnesses placed Davis at the crime scene and identified him as the gunman. Shell casings were linked to an earlier shooting that he was convicted of. But the weapon was never found and there was no other physical evidence such as blood or DNA to tie Davis to the crime. His lawyers claim he was a victim of mistaken identity. Some witnesses who gave evidence against him at his original trial have since recanted, while others have claimed that another man confessed to the killing.

Davis has received support from high profile figures including former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and former FBI Director William Sessions. However his conviction has been repeatedly upheld by state and federal courts. Last year, his lawyers failed to convince the US Supreme Court of his innocence and a judge decided new evidence was “largely smoke and mirrors.”

CURRENT U.S. DEATH ROW POPULATION BY RACE

BLACK 1,358 41.77% LATINO 394 12.12% WHITE 1,420 43.68% OTHER 79 2.43% (Death Row Population Figures from NAACP-LDF “Death Row USA (January 1, 2011)”

Powerful words rendered meaningless by a morally impotent Prime Minister

Terminally ill people warned over possible benefit cut

Thousands of people across the UK that are terminally ill  are being sent letters telling them that their benefits may be cut in April, if the changes to legislation are approved byParliament.

A bill is currently being scrutinised by the House of Lords that will affect Contributory Employment Support Allowance, which could be time-limited to 12 months from April 2012. The changes will also be retrospective, meaning that those  on CESA for more than twelve months when the rule comes into force will have their benefit cut immediately.

The Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham passed a motion earlier this week demanding that their MPs oppose the arbitrary cut-off limit contained in the Welfare Bill. Equally the plans are likely to face stiff opposition in the Lords.

You will no doubt remember Cameron’s evocative speech on May 3rd last year, just before polling day, when he said “The test of a good society is how do you protect the poorest, the most vulnerable, the elderly, the frail.”

Powerful words rendered meaningless by a morally impotent Prime Minister.

 

See the earlier article regarding Cameron’s speech: https://gobbledegooked.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/remember-camerons-pledge-to-look-after-the-vulnerable/

A poem for Dale Farm …

Gypsy creams

Unless you come of the traveller stock
That breaks the planning laws,
By building homes on greenbelt land:
Nay! Never on our shores!
Come one, come all, on verdant fields
– Where once the rabbits ran from foxes –
The trailer-homes of suburban folk
And double-glazed with window boxes!
No, these are not the Gypsy folk
But the backbone of red, white and blue,
But it isn’t right that the Gorgio stock
Should live as the Romany do.

Gorgios now invade the fields,
Could anything be more offensive?
But the money-men made gorgios’ homes
What they all said was too expensive.
Alack! What nightmare happening is this?
The post-Modern Traveller comes to pass,
With a trailer-home with pebble-dash
And a conservatory-end just made of glass?
No SUV to tow this home,
When an ‘M’ reg Skoda will surely do?
For it isn’t natural that the Gorgio blood
Should drive as the Romany do.

Unless you carry the traveller genes
You will never understand
The need for them to invade the fields
And set up home on greenbelt land.
And now we Gorgios do the same,
Uproot our kids and garden gnomes,
The trampoline and the porta-loo,
To embellish our terraced trailer-homes.
Compost bins and barbecues
And wheelie-bins for the rubbish too
For it isn’t fitting that the Gorgios
Should do the same as the Romany do.

If come you not of the Gypsy race
Think not of this as rank sedition,
For the caravan and an empty field
Will make you richer than rendition
To the urban sprawl you left behind,
Say Surbiton or Tooting Bec –
A year in your terraced trailer home
And you’ll be saying “What the heck!
At least the bills are left behind,
The mother-in-law and the tax man too!”
So there could be reason for the Gorgio race
To live their lives as the Romany do!

(With apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

n.b. Gorgio is the Romany word for a non-Gypsy in Britain

© 2011 – Henry Page, Newhaven, East Sussex

You’re not saddled with the problem …

An examination of, and a proposed solution for, the problems besetting the folk at Dale Farm …

Rule number one: establish terminology first. Thus the Oxford (Online) Dictionary definition is as follows:  http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/traveller (source) noun

a person who is travelling or who often travels:
1 (usually Traveller) British a Gypsy or other nomadic person.
2. (also New Age traveller) British a person who holds New Age values and leads an itinerant and unconventional lifestyle.

Neither fits into the category of settling down on a piece of land with the intention of it being a permanent home, let alone breaking all the planning laws in doing so. Neither can it be described as racial because anyone could illegally make a permanent home on a plot of land where no permissions exist and ALL would be evicted.

Solution: Go to the local authority as a homeless person and start your claim for housing, sign on for benefit and (hey presto) you will achieve the same effect that you have at Dale Farm but minus the mini-civil war that seems about to take place. The downside to this, of course, is that you will be subject to the same scrutiny as the rest of us for the purposes of tax and benefit compliance.   –    p.s. Sell the horse

The ‘Guinness Book of the World’s Weirdest Whackos’ more like …

An American singer with fingernails over 3 metres long and a student with a 10cm tongue are included in the entries of the 2012 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Aevin Dugas from New Orleans, Louisiana, is included for having grown the world’s largest natural afro. The Guinness World Records editor-in-chief Craig Lenday admitted the bookcelebrates “the weirdest and wackiest”.

Doncaster man Rob Hull, 49, is also in the book for having 571 Daleks – even though he is not a Doctor Who fan. Dalek collector Mr Hull purchased his first replica 20 years ago, and claims he became “enchanted” with them after seeing them in the shops.

The Reverend  Darrell Best, of Chicago, Illinois is a new entry to the records with the fastest wedding chapel after he converted his 1940s fire truck into a wedding chapel on wheels. The wedding chapel entitled ‘The Best Man’, allows lovers to tie the knot while they are on the road and is capable of reaching speeds of 62mph.

The new edition of the famous record book also sees a new claimant to the prestigious title of longest fingernails in the world. Christine Walton, 45, from Las Vegas, has fingernails over 3 metres long on her left hand and almost 3 metres on her right hand. “I hate all the cleaning, but I do it. And the makeup, I only wear so much,” said the singer. The previous record-holder, Lee Redmond of Salt Lake City, lost her nails in a

road traffic accident in 2009.

.

What would Roy Castle have said about all this?

Q: When is a traveller not a traveller? A: When he doesn’t travel.

UN representative accuses council of ”violating international law” over the clearance of a travellers’ site

Yves Cabannes, a professor at UCL’s Development Planning Unit and an advisor to the UN has said that  ‘a study which he led on forced eviction found that at Dale Farm and the UK in general the Government is “violating international human rights law on three points:  […] the right to adequate housing, the right to be defended from forced eviction and discrimination.”

The internet – and the news for that matter – is full of adventitious ‘voices for the voiceless’, as if travellers ever presented themselves with an inability to put across their opinions. One such voice at Travellers’ Times Online, Gypsy rights activist Grattan Puxon has warned: “A dirty, neo-fascist wave, a tsunami of social exclusion is to break over the peaceful Dale Farm community, smashing up lives and drowning the hopes of another generation of Traveller children, presently attending local schools… the ugliest yet act of ethnic-cleansing by a British local authority against an outpost of Europe’s nascent Roma nation .At a time of huge cuts, when Essex county council is axing 450 jobs and 12 youth centres, why has this council chosen to spend an astronomical £18 million to evict the Gypsy families who have lived peacefully on their site for many years?” 

On WordPress, the platform for this blog, there is another ‘champion’ for the travellers called ‘Save Dale Farm’ which reports that “The Homes and Communities Agency offer of land and funding for alternative sites had been rejected by Basildon” without any sort of discussion as to why taxpayers should donate land and fund the sites for ‘travellers’. If establishing a home is simply down to buying a plot of land and putting down roots, I (and presumably millions like me) will follow in the rush to set up our own homes for £20,000 instead of £200,000. There is absolutely no rationale whatever for one race to be treated differently than anyone else when it comes to the roof over your head.

The irony here is that Dale Farm has existed for ten years and many of the residents have lived there for that length of time. One of the complaints from the residents in Dale Farm is that they and their children will be uprooted. So why in the name of sanity do they call themselves travellers? If they no longer wish to travel and live somewhere they can do what everyone else does, either buy or rent a home and their problem is solved. What is apparent to the rest of us is that there is one class of person in the UK that expects to ride a coach and horses through the planning laws as a way of ‘putting down roots’ on the cheap.

Will you rail against the government’s latest back door tax?

Two years ago a watchdog report suggested European rail travellers generally get a better deal on tickets compared with British users, especially in south-east England.

Passenger Focus said that tickets prices – for journeys made the same day to London from elsewhere in the UK – generally cost more than similar journeys in other European countries. On average, fares were 50% higher in Britain than on the continent. Now Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has told MPs that the railways of the UK are a “rich man’s toy”. He was responding to a question about regulating fare prices on the planned high speed rail link so that it would be a “railway for everybody”. He said it was an “uncomfortable fact” that trains were already used by the better-off and said some fares were “eye-wateringly expensive”. Commuter season tickets are set to rise by about 8% on average next year. The above-inflation increase is part of the government’s agenda to reduce the cost to the public purse of running the rail network. But the Campaign for Better Transport described the change as a “disaster for people already struggling with rising costs”.

For example, averages for day return journeys of three to 10 miles in different countries show a considerable difference:

• Britain £6.92
• Germany £5.08
• Spain £2.52
• France £1.85

The Passenger Focus report said some long-distance fares to London were cheaper than comparable fares to other European big cities. But it also found that passengers wanting to travel at short notice or who needed flexibility in journey times would generally be charged more, compared with European ticket-buyers.

For example, in Britain long-distance turn-up-and-go fully flexible day-return fares to the principal city (London) were 87% more expensive than in the next most expensive country surveyed – Germany. This type of British fare was also more than three times as expensive than in the cheapest country surveyed – the Netherlands. British annual season tickets for journeys of no more than 25 miles were 88% more expensive than the next most expensive country – France – and more than four times pricier than the cheapest country – Italy.

For example, annual season tickets price averages for journeys of 11 to 25 miles were thus:

• Britain £1,860
• France £990
• Germany £944
• Spain £788
• Italy £444

Having masterminded the sell-off of British railway regions to their private sector friends, the Tories are now whittling the subsidies away to further reduce the state contribution. If left unchecked, prices will go through the roof over the term of this government. With commuter season ticket prices rising by an average of 8% over the next year it will make the viability of travelling by train even more shaky and, as it is being done to reduce train subsidies, merely serves as a back-door tax on hard working people who seek to do no more than to travel to work. It is another example of how we are not “all in this together”.

Sorry … what did the Conservatives say about Blair and the ‘nanny state’?

Throughout the last decade we heard little else from the Conservatives by way of criticism about Tony Blair than ‘the nanny state’.  The term nanny state was even coined by the Conservative British MP Iain Macleod who referred to “what I like to call the nanny state” in his column “Quoodle” in the December 3, 1965, edition of The Spectator. It then comes as the most awful shock to discover that the Tories have become ‘nanny statesmen’ themselves!

Overturning the culinary experience of 116 years, David Cameron’s government has put the nutritional nutcracker on the makers of HP Sauce and made them reduce the salt content from 2.1 per cent per 100g to 1.3 per cent, in line with government health guidelines. The changes were made by the manufacturer after signing up to the Coalition Government’s Responsibility Deal, which aims to reduce salt used by food manufacturers. The key pledges include an agreement to reducing salt in food so people eat 1g less per day by end of 2012.

HP became synonymous with greasy fry-up breakfasts and bacon sandwiches, the quintessential English ‘brekkie’. But woe! The experience is simply not the same now they have succeeded in reducing the salt level in the nation’s favourite brown sauce. The most famous critic, Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White, said he sent back a meal of sausages and mash at Piers Morgan’s Kensington pub The Hansom Cab last week because he thought it was off. “At first, I thought it was the sausages, but it wasn’t,” he said. “It was the HP, which tasted disgusting. It was definitely dodgy. I had no idea they had changed the recipe.”

It seems to have bypassed the logic of the Coalition that one would need to drink an entire bottle of HP Sauce to exceed the recommended daily allowance of 6g! So it would appear that the nanny state is alive and well but is now a Tory ethos. What a sauce!

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approvalof their own conscience.”

C. S. Lewis, (1898-1963), British novelist. Source: ‘God In The Dock’, 1948

One Lawson for the rich …

The fiscal matter of whether the top rate of tax should be cut or not is a diversion from the moral perspective of David Cameron’s ‘we’re all in this together’ mantra.

Essentially, what is being said is that the 50p top rate of tax merely deters the wealthy from being based here and thereby loses the exchequer money rather than increasing it. The argument is, to say the  least, a bizarre conundrum politically because the very people who have the most influence over the state of the nation’s finances, the top 1 per cent of earners, seem to be excused from the pain that Cameron says we should all feel.

Remember that the disabled, those below the poverty line, the frail, the elderly – anyone that you can imagine who might be classed as vulnerable  – all are suffering from cutbacks to their services and benefits. Those in a stronger position, that large swathe of ‘middle-England’ as it is described, those working and earning above average salaries are also being made to pay. Notwithstanding all of that, the argument here is that because the rich can simply boycott the UK and thereby reduce our tax-take, the richest in the country should be excused any pay back at all. This dichotomy will doubtless make the reasonable majority believe that the richest people in the UK are both uncaring and selfish and it could impact badly in terms of civil unrest. The latest political heavyweight to add his voice to those demanding that the top rate of tax is cut from 50p in the pound is Lord (Dominic) Lawson, though why anyone would take any notice of Lord Boom’n’bust on the economy is beyond me.

The saddest fact out of all of this is that it is those on the lowest incomes who are paying proportionately more from their disposable incomes. That, because of a rescue of banks and finance houses, is morally repugnant.