Tax letters

I have just received a letter from HM Revenue & Customs. It is the normally depresaing brown windowed envelope. The letter is fat as there is a lot of paper in it. It is my tax calculation for last year. Thankfully, I have nothing to pay. According to the letter, a due date has already passed and that I should not wait for my next Statement of Account. What due date is that, I wonder?

I will write to you again if I have any questions about your tax return - if you have any questions my telephone number is above.

There is no name. I do not know who 'I' is. The telephone number is the normal tax enquiry line.

The second sheet shows a tax calculation. It fits into the top third of the sheet of A4. The rest is blank. All the information could have fit on one sheet of A4. The letter also contains a leaflet - How to Pay, even though I don't owe anything. This is normal. I have had hundreds of letters of varying intelligibility from the tax office over the last year. Many letters contain many sheets of paper with just one Dada sentence on it.

The tax office likes to spend all our tax money on paper. They love the stuff. They love it so much the print a little bit of mathematical poetry onto each sheet and send it out to everyone in the land. It has to be asked, if the tax office didn't send out quite so much opaque text, that we would all pay a little less tax, or that the extra tax might go towards something useful?

For me, tax returns are like buses. You wait ages and then five come along all at once. I've just had to do tax returns for the last five years. I spent most of January like Sherlock Holmes on a paper trail. I felt like Starr on Clinton's impeachment - except that I was investigating my own past. It didn't seem like me.

Not only that, there was a cock up with the tax credit system. I was sent about £3,800 by them. I also received a letter explaining that this was money owed for about two years prior. Not only that, they didn't send one cheque, they sent cheques in obscure amounts of £162.17 and £138.48. I received over twenty cheques in brown envelopes - all on the same day. The paper, the postage, the waste…

I telephoned the tax credit people, but they knew nothing about it. This was two days before I went travelling for six months last year. When I got back I had over thirty letters desperately asking for the money back and some very nasty ones threatening me with court action.

The cheques are only valid for thirty days. These letters were sent in December. It should have been perfectly clear that they hadn't been cashed. Also, I had been sent more cheques and a few days later a letter asking for them back!

Anyway, I've had enough of it. All that wasted paper, all my wasted time. Granted that if you call the tax office they are friendly and helpful (hooray!).

Something is obviously a bit out of kilter with the computer system. I understand it must be a very large computer to rememember everyones tax details. Large it may be, but ultimately stupid - spitting out rubbish and sending it to people.