Anyone who has been hounded by HMRC for allegedly unpaid tax, almost always their fault or that of an employer, will not be comforted by the news that Google has been forced, dragging and kicking, to pay what is to them a trifling £130 million in back tax on the back of many billions of pounds earned from its British business arm over many years. For the chancer of the exchequer, George Osborne, to proclaim the agreement between HMRC and Google as a “victory” for action against tax dodging sums up the reality that we are patently not in it together.
I find the whole situation particularly galling when I was ruthlessly pursued by HMRC for tax in respect of a company car I supposedly had whilst working in a seasonal in-store job at bully boy supermarket giant Tesco. So far as I am aware, Tesco does not supply company cars for seasonal workers whose job doesn’t even entail leaving the store, but this didn’t prevent the tax collectors to go after me for back tax which I plainly didn’t owe.
I very much doubt that HMRC deal with behemoth employers in the same way as they do with mere ordinary folk. After all, ordinary folk don’t have access to speciality tax dodging lawyers and accountants. If HMRC says jump, your working man has to jump. HMRC’s commandments are total. If you don’t do as they are told, immediately, and within the timescale they set out, they’ll have you. No appeals system, no one you can talk to you face to face,no one you can really call, apart from a national hotline where it takes forever to get through and, yes, it costs a small fortune. I cannot imagine the CEO of Google being stuck on the line for an hour or so, waiting to speak to a real person instead of an automated voice and having to listen to ghastly music.
And get this. The CEO of HMRC, Lin Homer, was awarded a damehood in the New Years Honours or presiding over a shambles of an organisation that is all but inaccessible to Joe or Josephine Public. It is like awarding a university degree to a student who has failed all their exams.
It really is one rule for us and another for everyone else. Take the example of the odious journalist Kelvin MacKenzie, a highly vocal critic of tax dodgers like Facebook, Amazon and Google. Surely he cannot be related to the Kelvin MacKenzie who has made arrangements which, to quote Private Eye, amount to “little more than aggressive tax avoidance schemes” and are, according to former HMRC box Dave Hartnett, “schemes for scumbags?” Oh yes he can.
Forgive me for my cynicism but I see the HMRC tax collecting arm as being tough on working people, hassling them for what are to the rich and powerful minuscule sums of money and weak on the serial tax dodgers because they cannot so easily be bullied.
I’m glad the Revenue has finally caught up with Google but this is only a start. The less they pay to the exchequer the more we have to pay. That is not fair, but when was George Osborne ever interested in fairness?
