Revenue responds to questions over Sunday Times' attack

The Inland Revenue has answered UKTECH's questions regarding a Sunday Times article that quoted from disgruntled Revenue employees and the case of an IT contractor who was sent a £90m tax bill.

The Revenue responded as follows...

UKTECH - Is it true that Revenue officials follow an official instruction to 'process now, check later' with regard to correcting errors they may be seeing in people's self-assessment returns as is stated in the article?

IR - "The whole ethos of Self Assessment is that the onus is on the taxpayer to correctly complete and submit their tax return annually to the Inland Revenue. The system of process now, check later is a key part of Self Assessment and it was never the intention to check all tax returns issued. Our staff, when processing returns, do not intentionally ignore obvious errors."

UKTECH - Is it true that out of 9 million returns less than 400,000 are checked for accuracy?

IR - "The figure of 400,000 relates to the number of tax returns that the department takes up for enquiry action. We actually check 15,000 returns, randomly selected, for accuracy. These 15,000 undergo full-scale quality checks. This number gives us a clear indication of the level of our performance on processing accuracy."

UKTECH - Is it true that, as the article states 'figures suggest':

Last year one in five (1.8m) self-assessment bills contained errors resulting in the overpayment of tax?

IR - a) "We have achieved an 80% overall accuracy rate. The rate is measured over nine different areas of our work. It is therefore not accurate to say that there were 1.8 million errors leading to overpayments in every case."

2.2m PAYE tax bills were also wrong?

IR - b) "We are not clear where this figure has come from so unable to comment."

UKTECH - What your employees are calling 'filling in the blanks' by estimating key figures on tax forms rather than calculating them is also resulting in higher tax bills?

IR - "When our staff spot obvious errors they 'repair' the tax return. Any figures that they add will have been obtained from information received/held. We do this 'repair' work to reduce the need to contact the customer and also to reduce delays in producing tax statements."

UKTECH - Nearly 150,000 taxpayers overpaid their tax by £22 million after their tax details went 'missing'?

IR - "No tax details 'went missing'. This relates to a previously identified area where, due to problems with the implementation of the NIRS 2 computer system, we contacted affected taxpayers to ensure their tax details reflected the correct position."

UKTECH - According to the article someone in your ranks makes the allegation that your deadlines are making it impossible to calculate tax returns fairly and that because of the turnaround speed involved - 90 per cent of forms are never properly checked.

IR - "Obviously with any system that has specific deadlines there is a huge peak of work. Our staff cope extremely well and we have continually met our annual target for processing returns at 30th September and 31st January."

UKTECH - Are any of the people who are processing these forms students or temps? How many? Which agency are you using for the temps?

IR - "It is not national policy to specifically use students or temps to process returns. When we have new staff dealing with this area of work we give them adequate training."

UKTECH - Are your computer systems failing at peak times of processing?

IR - "No, in fact our SA and other computer systems have shown great resilience in coping with processing peaks throughout the past 12 months."

UKTECH - "Did you send Patrick Larven, a Warwickshire IT consultant, a tax bill for £320,000 and then another for £9 million? What happened there?"

IR - "Due to taxpayer confidentiality we are obviously unable to comment on any individual's tax affairs."

UKTECH - What is the current backlog of: self-assessment forms?

IR - "We have around 800,000 tax returns awaiting processing."

UKTECH - Did the Revenue dispatch:

400,000 tax bills to taxpayers who had already paid, last year?

600,000 tax demands in 1999 asking for information about the wrong year?

IR - "We are unable to relate these figures to any information we have correlated in the past, so unable to comment."

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Richard Powell, UKTECH