CITY AND SUBURBAN
No time for tea — it's a hard life being a taxman but it's harder for the taxpayer
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Never a quiet moment, working for the Inland Revenue. First we send all those tax returns out, then we get them back again and then we bounce them. There is scarcely time for tea. How tiresome these taxpayers are. They can't even fill in one of our new self-assessment forms and get it right first time. We have had to have a list of mis- takes printed out: You have failed to enter a sub-total/used the wrong kind of ink/left the date out, and so on. Then we tick the lists and clip them to the forms and stuff them in brown envelopes and post them off, so that everybody gets the chance to try again over Christmas and avoid a penalty in the new year . . . Yes, the taxman's work is hard, but at least he need only work in the Inland Revenue's time, in its modest but convenient offices and at its expense. It may not always cross his tidy mind that his counterparty lacks these advantages. The taxpayer must assess himself in his own time, from his own records and documents if he can find them, searching hopelessly behind the clock and under the cat. He is not paid for his work: on the contrary. By the time he has costed in his own efforts in accounting for some puny payment — a transient gleam of interest, as it might be, from his bank — his marginal rate of tax may be more than 100 per cent. How much he might prefer to send his answer to the tax- man on a postcard. With Max Tax, he could.
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