This week's opinion: 26 November 2020

In a taxi this week I noticed an advertisement stating ‘tax returns from £50’. That made me think – even taking account of that little word ‘from’ this was bargain basement pricing. Nothing wrong with that, but I did wonder what could be provided for that cost. Could a tax system so complex that, for example, last week in his article ‘Annoying algorithms’ it took Tim Good five pages to show how to calculate liability with only five return entries, be commoditised in this way? Surely all that could be done for £50 was to put raw figures into return software without any form of review, let alone advice. Couldn’t taxpayers do the same thing for themselves on the HMRC website? 

Then I remembered that on one occasion, I had been happy to pay the post office a fee to check the form I had completed for a new passport. Did it need checking? I can fill in in a simple form and include the necessary documents but, nevertheless, I was prepared to pay for the assurance that I had done it correctly. Paying a small fee for somebody to put the right numbers in the right boxes on a tax return really is no different. 

HMRC is right to make it easy for individuals to do their own returns and it should never be compulsory to employ an agent. But, however simple the process is, some – perhaps many – people will still want the assurance of somebody else checking a return before it is submitted. Any system must accommodate that as a basic principle. 

The taxi on my return journey had no advertisements and I was forced to listen to the driver going on at length about Covid-19 conspiracy theories. But that’s quite another story.