HMRC is suggesting that our wages should be sent to them instead of to us. They will deduct the tax due and only then send our money to our banks.
Not mine, they won’t.
Of course, we all trust the bureaucrats to look after our money and not, for example, to lose the dvd containing the payment authorisation for our cash, or losing our record so that, hey, what do you know, you’re not getting paid this month.
We know, don’t we, that they are not going to make any mistakes, and that, if they do, some bureaucrat in Glasgow* is going to confess its** error and cough up your cash straight away, don’t we?
And, heaven forfend that your cash or your personal financial details will end up on some eurocrat’s desk in the EUSSR, that could never happen, could it?
Time for the Tea Party to return to the Mother Country, methinks.
*No offence, JM, just that if you live in Polperro and your wages are sent to the other end of the country instead of to you…
** Non-gender specific – applies particularly well to bureaucrats 🙂
Boadicea's Chariot 
I think this would be the final turn of the screw, the one that makes the worm turn and the British people awake from the stupor and lethargy that seems to have enveloped us all for so long. As for the Tea Party? Sign me up Bravo.
I’m in too, please!
We kall know what the ‘T.E.A.’ stands for, don’t we?
No – do tell
Nor mine!
First they’d take the tax, then the handouts for the parasites and their myriad bastards, then the wogs, halve the rest for ‘global warming’ and you would get a groat in the £!
About time they were nailed in their offices and a large bonfire built at the doors!
Long live the revolution, any revolution.
‘Taxed Enough Already’ 🙂
Right! – as Noah said.
Given the cock-ups with their computers, this is the craziest idea yet.
don’t you lot trust our government and inland revenue? I am shocked and stunned.
RR, of course we do, after all, their record is so gooooood…
‘We know, don’t we, that they are not going to make any mistakes, and that, if they do, some bureaucrat in Glasgow* is going to confess its** error and cough up your cash straight away, don’t we?’…….
*No offence, JM, just that if you live in Polperro and your wages are sent to the other end of the country instead of to you.’
Hi Bravo. No offence taken. Please feel free to be as rude as you possibly can be about each and every aspect of Glasgow. No skin off my Embran nose. JW might be a wee bit hurt, of course.
Seriously, thanks for the link. Pity the consultation period ended today so we can’t all fire off our comments. But it did make interesting reading. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I think that the Real Time Information suggestion is very interesting and does seem yo address a lot of the problems which flow from the new working practices of short term contracts etc. If it really did reduce the number of underpayments and overpayments that can presently only be calculated after the tax year end when the employers send in their returns, that surely has to be a good thing? If it also did away with the need for P45’s and delivered the promised reductions in benefit fraud which might flow from immediate recording of any changes in employment status or circumstances, then I’m all for it.
The devil’s in the detail, of course. You read all these promises of a brave new world of PAYE and then you get to:-
‘4.27. Payroll software would need to be enhanced to extract the relevant information from employers’ systems at the time a payment was made.’
In other words, they don’t really know yet if they could actually do it.
Agree with you completely in your opposition to their suggestion that Centralised Deduction could follow on. I can see what they are trying to say but even I am not enough of a Pollyanna to think that is a development that we could or should ever accept as taxpayers.
http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/downloadFile?contentID=HMCE_PROD1_030623
I don’t know why we can’t scrap PAYE entirely. The system in Hong Kong, for example, works like this. At the end of each fiscal year, your employer sends you a form detailing your pay and bonuses for the year. You fill in the allowances you claim, send it off to the taxman ans a couple of weeks later your tax bill comes back and you pay – unless you dispute the amount, of course, then you go round the circle again. The form is no more than three pages, simples.
To help spread the load, there is a kind of ‘voluntary’ PAYE system. You open a Tax Credit account through your bank and put in as much or as little as you like as and when you like. You are paid interest at a point or so below BLR. At the end of the year, you go online, open your account, hit the button that says, ‘Take it out of my tax credits,’ and you’re done.
Grrrrrr,
The assholes with the cash to hire the corrupt accountants will always find a way to escape paying what they owe. End of.
Ferret. Of course. Scrap all allowances and introduce a flat tax rate after a certain level of income. Simples.
Aye weel on the ‘simples’. Simplistic solutions are always immensely satisfying. The problem is that it is not often that ‘simples’ to get there from wherever you happen to have been put by your history and/or culture.
My guru, Ferret, is, of course, right that tax evasion by the self-employed should be ruthlessly pursued and extirpated. I thought, however, that we were talking about PAYE?
So, given that it will never happen in the real world that we will rip up our present tax regime and start again from scratch, I still believe that the proposal for Real Time Information in PAYE has some merit and deserves to be investigated at the very least.
I could, of course, be wrong.
You are, indubitably, right that we won’t rip up what’s not working and instead try to patch it up – and the history of big government IT projects is extremely reassuring, isn’t it? A pity that we don’t have the balls to do something imaginative.