Some of my best friends work for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and no, I can’t get used to ‘his’ rather than ‘her’, either, so what follows is in no way critical of its staff who, like me when I worked for the DWP, were only obeying orders. But if you, like me, have a tendency to feel about two feet tall at times when contemplating one’s failures in life, correspondence from HMRC like this can be very dispiriting, which was how I felt a few months ago when I got a tax demand. It went a bit like this:
Dear Loser,
You’ve been at it again, haven’t you? Fiddling your taxes, this time. This means war. In short, this means:
YOU OWE US £50
I’m not going to say how this fraudulent activity came about – and let’s face it, low life people like you are always committing fraud – but we are taking it back from you.
Not only am I not going to say how you have defrauded your fellow taxpayer, there’s no mechanism for you to get a full explanation and certainly no right of appeal.
Now fuck off and die.
Yours Faithfully,
Jim Harra
(CEO HMRC)
Even if there was some kind of appeal mechanism, I’d have no idea what I was appealing about. I declare all my modest income – including the coppers I earn from book sales (more about that in a moment) and even the Buy Me A Coffee grift on this blog – and you think that would be the end of it, but clearly it isn’t. Short of owing a few quid to HMRC for my earnings as a food bank volunteer (the square root of fuck all), I’m not even sure I made a mistake with my tax returns because there is nothing for me to return. But now I feel a bit like a criminal, if only in my eyes. If that felt bad enough, imagine how I felt when another letter from the tax office arrived today, this time from USA USA USA?
All the way from Seattle, Washington, sent FIRST CLASS INTERNATIONAL, comes an envelope with IMPORTANT TAX DOCUMENT ENCLOSED. The Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service is now on my case. With great trepidation, I rip the envelope open at breakneck speed and inside there’s a form – of course there’s a form – called 1042-S, Foreign Person’s U.S Source Income Subject to Withholding 2023, Copy B for Recipient. I struggle enough with British forms but this one is something else.
All they know about me is my name, which infuriatingly they say is Richard. I hate, abso-fucking-lutely loathe Richard, not least because I was too weak and gutless to insist for half of my life that I wanted to be Rick, or Ricky or Rickie and not Richard, or worse still Rich. Anyway, they know my name, ‘WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE’ and that’s it. Almost none of the IRS stuff appears to be in English. The form refers to:
- Withholding allowance
- Check if federal tax withheld was not deposited with the IRS because escrow procedures were applied
- Tax rate 30.00
- Tax paid by withholding agent (amounts not withheld) (see instructions)
- Withholding agent’s EIN
- Intermediary or flow-through entity’s EIN
- Payer’s GIIN
And so on. After reading through the form over and over and, yes, over again, it appears that they have sent me a letter that states they have withheld some money from me, but what, why and how?
Next, I dug into the accompanying guff which appears to explain everything. Amazon told the IRS I had received ‘Other royalties (or example, copyright, software, broadcasting, endorsement payments)’ and have withheld 80 cents of federal tax. 80 fucking cents.
Obviously I am worried and fully expect the IRS to call for my extradition, possibly before the end of the week. But what is it that I have earned? It wasn’t any of the examples they provided. I reckon I sold a copy of my book and this is a royalty payment. If this is true, something like one in 332 million Americans have a copy of my book. No wonder I was able to retire younger.
Truth be told, it’s only my paranoia and overwhelming sense of failure and self-pity that I worry about this stuff at all, the pathetic inferiority complex, and even petty jealousies I have when I whine about how the rich and powerful can avoid and evade sums of money that I could only dream about and here I am having £50 of what I thought was mine taken away by our government and 80 cents denied to me by America.
At least with the IRS, there appears to be the opportunity to reclaim that 80 cents and I may just do that as a matter of skewed principle. But then again, it will probably cost even more to sort it out. Just imagine how much it cost for the IRS to send me a first class letter from the USA USA USA?
Either way, I’m not really paranoid. But why do they keep picking on me?
