It has been revealed, yesterday, that HM Revenue & Customs failed to collect £42 billion of taxes owed last year. This is another impressive best ever record. The last Labour government has managed to build up a massive accumulated debt of about £800 billion, which cost us £40 billion in annual interest payments and now it turns out that we have a similar amount in uncollected taxes. So more than half of the annual government spending debt is a result of building the debt up and up and failing to collect the taxes. How incompetent can government get? It is staggering. I have said for some time that much of our government's deficit could be eliminated if [a] they stopped legislating for no purpose - what Chris Mullins would have described as "moving the deck chairs," only this is on a monster scale - moving millions of deck chairs, year after year; and [b] get rid of the vast layers of bureaucracy. This last, I think the Coalition is trying to do.
The failure to collect taxes is due to incompetence, the black economy - and nobody is quite sure how much this amounts to, tax evasion, delayed payments and so on. The HMR&C is in a mess anyway and is now trying to collect tax from individuals whose PAYE calculations were wrong. If they can't get this right, it is not surprising that they are failing to collect all taxes.
If the government can simplify things they may be able to reduce the pointless costs of running the system but they may never reduce the staff because the unions will insist that we employ armies of people doing absolutely nothing.
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