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HMRC do have a sense of humour.


paulears

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I just got this from HMRC - so it seems they do have a sense of humour.

 

expenses and excuses

 

Every year, following the 31 January Self Assessment (SA) deadline, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) receives a number of imaginative and intriguing excuses for not completing tax returns on time. Each year also sees some widely optimistic expense claims. Recent excuses include:

 

1. I couldn’t file my return on time as my wife has been seeing aliens and won’t let me enter the house.

2. I’ve been far too busy touring the country with my one-man play.

3. My ex-wife left my tax return upstairs, but I suffer from vertigo and can’t go upstairs to retrieve it.

4. My business doesn’t really do anything.

5. I spilt coffee on it.

 

As well as the excuses, HMRC also receives some questionable items which taxpayers have tried to expense:

 

1. A three-piece suite for my partner to sit on when I’m doing my accounts.

2. Birthday drinks at a Glasgow nightclub.

3. Vet fees for a rabbit.

4. Hotel room service – for candles and prosecco.

5. £4.50 for sausage and chips meal expenses for 250 days.

 

The excuses and expenses listed above were all rejected.

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5. £4.50 for sausage and chips meal expenses for 250 days.
Fussy eater. So what?

 

Yeah, I wasn't sure what they were trying to say there. Is menu variety in HMRC's purview now? Were they trying to say they didn't believe it? I'm confused.

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Is it not that you can claim meal expenses for special trips / working away but not for day-to-day stuff and so if you’re having the same meal (presumably at the same restaurant) for 200 days then this stops becoming a deductible expense and is simply a cost of living like your mortgage?
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Is it not that you can claim meal expenses for special trips / working away but not for day-to-day stuff and so if you're having the same meal (presumably at the same restaurant) for 200 days then this stops becoming a deductible expense and is simply a cost of living like your mortgage?

Maybe the travelling magician ate at a lot of Little Chefs and always had the same meal at the same price, but in many different locations?

 

 

Must have had a cast-iron stomach; I once ate a Little Chef's sausage a sausage at a Little Chef restaurant and was horribly sick afterwards.

 

 

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I read it that someone was trying to claim £900 as expenses and they thought that £4.50 a day for food was a way to do it - it just looks dodgy being the same amount every day. I think for genuine expenses the amount would vary - if it had been varying amounts they might not have challenged it.
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The fact that they were looking at individual items suggests the claimants may already have been under investigation. I have the impression that if your overall pattern is much the same from year to year they leave you alone, though there is always to possibility of being picked at random to go under the spotlight.
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The huge complicated mess of a UK tax return is a direct result of them trying to patch up loopholes invented by large scale tax evaders. (Otherwise known as the House of Lords.) Instead of dealing with it correctly by charging them with tax evasion, they just invent some fatuous new rule that results in the huge messy and often self-contradicting tax system.

 

Here on the Isle of Man the tax form is basically "How much did you earn after all materials and expenses?" and that's it.

 

In the UK it's more like "Do you have any convoluted payments time shifted to gilt edged bonds and cross referenced to a different accounting period with offset income allowances according to non linear banking statements pre-dating to 1987 but not falling outwith regulation IR47963 of 2012?" Yes or no. Answering this question incorrectly may result in criminal charges being raised and a minimum fine of £20,000 for each uncorrelatable instance of disambiguation.

 

How about we just reboot the entire UK tax system and start from scratch.

 

And then to add insult to injury they then blow all our tax money out the window by dishing it out to their buddies through contrived "public contracts" managed by certain construction companies who furnish the jobs with a mass of low-wage and low-skill labour trained in-house with slide-shows and token gesture tests that everyone passes.

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Oh it's a lot worse than that Clive. The Big Four accountancy firms have hundreds of employees embedded within HMRC advising the government on the making of tax law and this present party in power see no objection to those Big Four then selling tax avoidance schemes to their clients to minimise the taxes caused by the laws they have advised on.

 

Funny old version of capitalism, this. Smells a lot like corruption to me.

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