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Email from: HMRC head office
To: customer-facing staff
Subject: Reasonable excuse
Almost 900,000 customers did not file their 2013/14 tax returns by 31 January 2015.
Someone (we’re looking for you) has leaked an email suggesting that we are taking a more lenient line on reasonable excuses and the £100 penalty this year. Wrong. What we are trying to do is make sure that we don’t spend a lot of time investigating whether claims are reasonable.
To that end, the customer services department has written the following “cut out and keep” guidance so that our employees can easily recognise what is and is not a reasonable excuse.
What is a reasonable excuse?
The department already accepts the following as examples of a “reasonable excuse”: the recent death of a partner; an unexpected stay in hospital; a computer failure; a problem with the HMRC website; fire; and postal delay.
What is not a reasonable excuse?
Perhaps we should recap on last year’s “top ten” rejections.
- The dog ate my return.
- I was up a mountain.
- I fell in with the wrong crowd.
- Trying to escape a foreign intelligence agency.
- Barack Obama is in charge of my finances.
- Busy looking after parrots and fox cubs.
- A work colleague borrowed my tax return.
- I live in a camper van in a car park.
- My girlfriend’s pregnant.
- I was in Australia.
In addition to these “no-noes” we have added ten more that we would also not regard as reasonable:
- Alien abduction.
- I ran out of toilet paper.
- Too busy watching Gogglebox.
- The government only wastes my money.
- I am only visiting Earth.
- What tax return?
- The voices told me not to.
- Do you know who I am?
- I have a note from my mum.
- I’m tall and heard that “only little people pay tax”.
Keep this handy guide by your desk and help us to collect those penalties.
There should be almost £90m due.
