This blog entry was written several days ago. Shunning toilet breaks, fire alarms and other ephemera, I spent goodly time choosing the words that would best form a message as crisp as a freshly plucked green apple.

My literary toil eventually yielded delicious fruit, which I harvested (read: copied and pasted into this website's backend), and then... nothing.

The hard-worked sentences for which I had exacerbated my RSI simply sat on my computer screen for a while: black streaks of thought on a glowing white background of possibility. I didn't publish the results of my graft; it slipped my mind to do so.

Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? And yet that’s the excuse with which Pontyberem Rugby Football Club successfully appealed against a £400 late-filing penalty.

The club’s only employee, a Mr Harries (rather pompously, the decision document provides no first name), said he completed an online tax return but forgot to press the submission button.

That’s right: Mr H succeeded in the fiddly task of completing a P35, but he failed in the far simpler job of sending it on its way. And the First-tier Tribunal – presided over by Taxation’s chum Anne Redston – was fine with that, because Mr H ‘did not have a computer and had no computer skills’.

But he had found access to a machine easily enough, it would seem – and he was able to handle a web-based Revenue form (albeit with the help of a third party). I fail to see a significant difficulty.

Mr H’s ‘lack of experience with computers [was] a factor to consider’, according to the tribunal.

Would my inexperience of filling in a self assessment form be taken into consideration should I ever need to do so and then make a right flipping bodge of the job? I suspect not.

If I did not send the taxman a return and then claim ignorance about the requirement to do so: would that be a reasonable excuse? After all, isn’t it more likely to own a PC or Mac than have to fill in an SA document? Pah!

In the digital age, naivety about technology is forgivable, apparently.

Okay. Then the Revenue should be doing a darn sight more to deliver the message of online services – not to the taxpayers in general, but to in tucked away places like Pontyberem, where those new fangled computers (first developed around 70 years ago) are apparently someone else’s business.

At least the tribunal noted that ‘being computer illiterate is not, of itself, a reasonable excuse’. Darn right!

• Blog