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I welcome HMRC’s consultation on tax repayment companies (tinyurl.com/hmrcrepayagcondoc). We have covered this several times in the magazine and only recently I was at an event where advisers were sharing their stories.
Reform in this area is long overdue. In an ideal world, it would be so easy to make repayment claims that there would be no need for repayment companies to exist. In the consultation HMRC says it wants to make the process as simple as possible for people to make claims and that a digital service exists.
I tried it out. I did a search for ‘tax back on uniform’, which is the phrase I think a member of the public might use. I was pleased to find that the GOV.UK site came at the top of the list. So far, so good. I followed the trail to see what tax I could reclaim. I had to click 17 times before I reached a page which told me how much I might get back. For a basic rate taxpayer this was all of £12 a year. I might have given up at this point, but I went on, only to find myself having to log in on the government gateway site. There I stopped – I didn’t want to do anything which might show up on my personal tax account. I imagine that most people who had persevered that far would have done the same.
Government money must not be paid out without checks being made. But the contrast between the HMRC site and the questionable commercial sites is enormous. It is easy to see why people are attracted to them. The more HMRC can do to make the claims process easy, the less the attractiveness of the repayment companies becomes.
If you do one thing…
Read the summary of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tax administration report (tinyurl.com/oecdexsumtaxadm). There is much food for thought here which we will be following up in future editions.
