talkmagic.co.uk

I'm sat here quietly filling in my Tax Return online. Everything's going smoothly until they ask for any other income. I sold an endowment last year for a little over the surrender value. Is that difference taxable? I look through all the online help and guides and become more confused. I call the national helpline but they have no trained advisers available. They put me onto the local tax office. The local office has no one available UNTIL 08:30am CHRISTMAS EVE!!!

Can you not ask them to open the book to the correct page and then divine the answer for yourself

I had a slightly similar experience with Customs & Excise (as they used to be) where I phoned the 'helpline' to ask for a ruling on a VAT issue. All they could do was give me the website link for the series of VAT notes which allegedly covered my query. Of course, they did nothing of the sort but by the time I’d found that out the C&E Office was closed for the weekend. All I could do was make an educated guess and leave copious notes on our file copies in case a future VAT inspection raised the question again.

Totally Mental wrote:Can you not ask them to open the book to the correct page and then divine the answer for yourself

The people I spoke to seem to be absolutely terrified of even appearing to know what a book is, let alone open one and appear to give advice! This can only be done by a Higher Technical Officer, which seem to be rarer than unicorn manure...

Maybe they are run by the same people as www.iwantoneofthose.com

Sounds like it!

Mandrake wrote:I had a slightly similar experience with Customs & Excise (as they used to be) where I phoned the 'helpline' to ask for a ruling on a VAT issue. All they could do was give me the website link for the series of VAT notes which allegedly covered my query. Of course, they did nothing of the sort but by the time I’d found that out the C&E Office was closed for the weekend. All I could do was make an educated guess and leave copious notes on our file copies in case a future VAT inspection raised the question again.

The strange thing is that apart form this one issue, my tax return consists entirely of a box containing my gross turnover. I rarely spend anything worth claiming back.