I got a letter from the tax office the other day and this is what it said;

We have now written to you three times asking for the overdue amount shown above (£1700.95 with interest) but our records show you still have not paid or contacted us.

If you do not pay or contact us we may decide to contact a Debt Collecting Agency to collect this amount for us.

I’m not sure if Costa Coffee, Google, Amazon or the likes of Peter Green get letters saying that the HMRC are about to send the boys in for the gazillions they have avoided in tax but what made this even more galling is the fact that I paid this on the 13th September and I have paper and internet banking evidence to prove it.

I rang up the tax office and explained this before someone booted down my front door and stole my television. The conversation that ensued almost took my breath away courtesy of its bizarre combination of stupidity, incompetence and farcical nature.

First of all, it was more or less denied that I had paid the money in September as they had no evidence of it. As you can imagine, this was something that had me panicking that I had sent it to someone else by mistake but eventually he found it…In another account?

I have HMRC Tax and NI stored on my BACS payment list and have paid them that way for years, so how it lands up in the wrong account, I really, really, can’t tell you.

Still, at least he retrieved my payment. However, the figure didn’t match so this was where I had to step in and do his job for him and explain why it appeared underpaid by £7.68.

£7.68 you see, was the interest that had occurred…Sorry, WOULD have occurred, had I not paid the original (£1693.27) bill on the 13th September but I had, so there was really no need to send some thug round to kick my door down and nick the telly.

Just as my blood pressure began receding back to satisfactory levels, he decided he had not finished yet by proceeding with a mathematical calculation that would blow out the brains of Albert Einstein.

“Okay sir, that’s sorted out for you now, so it’s just £420.00 to pay, would you like to do that today?

I really can’t remember the conversation after that; I was in something of a daze, metaphorically punch drunk by the whole ordeal. However I can remember refusing to hand over the money whilst muttering to myself something about buying the chap an abacus for Christmas.

To be honest, I stopped getting annoyed with him, he was just reeling off the information in front of him and was merely a puppet for the imbeciles above him that he had probably never even met because they were permanently out lunch or on holiday in the Cayman Islands.

However, what this whole incident did teach me is this.

The vast majority of people in this country accept personal taxation to pay for roads, hospitals, schools, colleges, libraries, a couple of aircraft carriers estimated at £3 billion but are now costing £6 billion, MP’s expenses and few billion quid’s worth of  bankers bail-outs.

As a consequence, if there is an error of judgement of a couple of grand, the tax office will threaten the individual with bailiffs, even if the error is of their (the Tax office) own doing.

If there is blatant avoidance of millions or billions, it is nothing that can’t be swept under the carpet courtesy of a nice lobster dish quaffed down with a bottle of Dom Perignon and a party political party donation.

That’s what it feels like…Uh oh…Who’s that at the door?

Is that the Bailiff…Or the postman coming to hand me a HMRC cheque for the £1300 I am still owed from 2011?