Tax Collection, the next frontier (UK edition)

[Dianora]

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC, which includes Inland Revenue, their version of IRS) proposed that Employers send their employee's paycheck directly to HMRC, whereby they'll send whatever remaining back to the employee.

[Tenaka]

This scares the crap out of me.

[Chicken]

That gives me a mental image of a guy with scissors cutting your paychecks in half.

[Annadin]

This does indeed scare the crap out of me.
As an employer, I pay enough money to buy a top-of-the-range family car to HMRC every single month via PAYE, because I was always taught not to mess around with The Tax Man. That said, I know both from friends who work locally for HMRC and anecdotally from others in business, that they are really struggling at the moment to keep on top of workloads and some folks are taking advantage of that.

It took over 6 months to agree a refund on our Corporation Tax from two years ago, so I'd hate to find myself needing a personal tax refund due to an error under the new system. People can't afford to wait 6 months! That said, PAYE was brought in when people predominantly only had one source of income and things were a lot simpler. HMRC need to jump forward about 50 years to get back up to date.

[Candiru]

While functionally its not that different to the current system where your employer pays tax out of your payslip to HMRC, I wouldn't trust HMRC to deal with all the complains/problems whereas your employer is more likely to sort things out for you.

I don't see this actually happening, too much opposition would happen.

They could simply get your income from your employer and use that to update your taxcodes on a monthly basis rather than the current yearly updates which then go wrong.

[Jabari]

Hey Dianora,

Do you happen to follow Karl Denninger's Market Ticker? He just put up a good post that would be right up your alley.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=167483