Does anybody in this country actually know anything about tax? Does it really need to be this difficult to make money? I swear they have designed a system that is complicated only so that when you do overpay tax, it is so much hassle to get it back that you end up giving up!

Tax

I am not a big fan of the British tax office, or the tax rates. For the past 3 years I have been registered as self employed. That in itself need not be that complicated. But I was self employed whilst working full time in one job and part time in another. This then gets very confusing. I am paying tax for being self employed, despite earning under the threshold for income tax and national insurance, and then paying tax on the earnings I make in my other 2 jobs.

Yet when filling in my tax return online, I get nothing to tell me how much I should be paying or if I have over paid. In fact, last year I moved to Canada for 5 months, and on the day I got their I had a letter from the tax office telling me that my numbers were incorrect for my tax return 2 years previous. They claimed that I had not listed any of my employed earnings from that year.

For the tax year in question, I had earned £300 from my self employed work and the rest entirely from my employed work. Surprisingly enough, I did not forget to leave out 99% of my earnings as they claimed. I did in fact put everything in correctly and paid an extra £95 in income tax as instructed on completion of the return. If I had only listed the £300 self employed earnings as the Tax Auditor claimed, then I would not have to have paid anything.

When I tried to explain this to the tax office, after 2 months of them not answering the phone, I was told that they had no record of me paying anything for that year. Fantastic. It turns out that I actually agreed with the figures they claimed were correct, because they were the exact figure I used the first time. So I sent a letter agreeing that the figures were correct, however informing them that they have clearly lost 2 crucial bits of data from my original tax return of that year, my employment earnings that I did enter correctly and the fact that I already paid the tax due.

A month goes buy and rather than paying any attention to what I actually said they just sent me a new bill for £125. So here is essentially what happened for the first tax year where I was self employed: I earned £300, then paid £215 of tax.

Screwed Economy

As you can probably imagine, I am quite keen for the tax office to go and hide somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine, to put it very very politely.