This is interesting...

Is it only me...but the Tax Apparatchiks didn’t need to do this.

One day last week I got home to find a letter from the Her Maj’s Tax Apparatchiks awaiting my return from a hard day at the coal face trying to earn enough money to pay my taxes to keep this country afloat and awash with hospitals, schools and benefit payments. It was therefore with a sense of trepidation, fear and concern that I opened the letter from Her Maj’s people.

Surely they don’t want more bawbees from me was my instinctive response? Have I not yet fully paid for the local hospital I never use? How many more Apparatchiks’ pensions must I now fund?

You can therefore imagine my delight, pleasure and surprise to be informed that instead of me giving yet more of my hard earned money to the Two Caesars and their legions of Apparatchiks, it had been decided that they owed me. It wasn’t much but in these straightened times every little helps and in my mind I am far better positioned to spend my money more efficiently than some cosseted Apparatchik.

I was a little puzzled as to why I deserved such largesse especially as I was sure that dealings between me and the Tax Apparatchik were all square. You can be assured that I promptly pay every bawbee that I am required by current tax legislation to pay.

And therein lay the problem. I had paid all that was owed promptly. Indeed I had paid too promptly, well in advance of the deadline and therefore I was owed interest.

Now it might only be me but this is an absolute nonsense.

You may have guessed by now that I am not a huge big fan of being deprived of money I have worked hard to earn by whichever lot is in power. (You may have inferred this conclusion by reading between the lines of my writings and musings-and you would be right.)

Notwithstanding this however I do accept the need to pay whatever taxes I am owed and as it suits me to settle up at the earliest opportunity that is what I do. I do not expect to be recompensed or incentivised for doing this. If I wish to pay early then surely all should applaud that-at least it means we don’t have to go cap and hand to borrow from the Chinese to pay for our schools, hospitals, pensions and benefits.

And we also have the rule of double jeopardy at work here-I get some money unexpectedly back and the Apparatchiks have to spend even more money calculating, raising and processing the refund which would far outstrip the face value of the cheque, given the cost of Apparatchiks these days.

No, the money would have been better spent reducing the cost of the National Debt rather than giving me the liquid funds to buy a coffee.
But I did keep the money! Even though this is a national scandal.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.