a taxing question

I thought that the Inland Revenue was supposed to be zeroing in on tax evasion schemes, to bring in some billions rightfully due to the Exchequer, so that we could close the fiscal deficit, before starting to actually pay down the however-many-it-is trillion dollar debt.  And I vaguely thought that the current administration were ideologically committed to cutting unnecessary red tape, to enable enterprise to flourish.  And wanted to encourage the Big Society, in which citizens beavered away helping each other in a myriad of ways, large and small.

Apparently not.  HMRC and the Treasury could choose to devote their finite resources to catching some big fish, redrafting tax rules to clamp down on avoidance schemes by large multinationals, or applying a modern day Morton's Fork to the oligarchs of Kensington.  They could, or they could decide to tighten the Gift Aid rules for small charities.

Hanging over me in my role as Divisional Treasurer of the local beekeepers is the requirement to supply details of our Gift Aid claim for 2013, when total subscriptions and donations were £3,707.40, deriving from over a hundred members.  Some have signed Gift Aid declarations, some haven't.  Maybe they don't want to, or maybe they don't hit the income tax threshold and aren't eligible.  You would think that would be fine, tag the subscriptions that qualify and add them up, easy peasy.

Not so.  According to the County Treasurer, the Inland Revenue have now tightened up the rules and require the following information:  title, forename, surname, first line of address, postcode, amount and date paid.  How long do they think it will take a volunteer, amateur accountant working with piles of handwritten membership forms and a spreadsheet that wasn't designed to produce the information in that format to pull it out?  I should say it was a full morning's work, if not a day's worth, especially given that we had a new Membership Secretary half way through the subscription renewal season.  It isn't management information that we require in any way, shape or form to run the association.  I check who has paid their subs, but I don't need to reconcile the date their cheque was paid in to their postcode.

And more to the point, what is the Inland Revenue going to do with the information once they've got it?  How much time and effort are they going to expend in matching these titles, forenames, surnames, addresses, post codes and dates to other data they hold, to check up on a claim which would be for less than four thousand pounds even if every single member had ticked the Gift Aid box?  Suppose that we are wildly overstating our claim for Gift Aid, how much money are we going to fraudulently claim from the public purse?  It reminds me depressingly of the great Inland Revenue clamp down on the cricket clubs of Hertfordshire which I wrote about a year or two back. Legitimate tax due successfully clawed back, diddly squit to a jam tart.  Non-taxing make-work for Inland Revenue staff that saves them from having to deal with something more difficult or nasty, ten out of ten.