Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "HMRC needs to be in every town and city in the country" video.

Spot on, Richard. There was not only the advantage of being able to spot the rogues but also accountability for staff. I worked in a PAYE tax district in the 1970s. We each had an allocation of taxpayers - from a few hundred to several thousand depending on complexity. We established relationships with taxpayers and employers and, believe it or not, this makes even something as banal as taxation less unpleasant and impersonal. And everything was much more manageable: Everyone got a tax return when they started work and then at least once 6 years after that. If their affairs were complex they would get an annual return. The point being to avoid build-ups of underpayment or overpayment. The only hitch was the system of files and control cards which had to be transferred between offices when there was a change of employment. Sometimes, if someone had several jobs over a period, it could take weeks to get all the informaiton together and make repayments or allocate tax codes. But all that information is now on computer and it can be transferred in literally minutes. Computerisation could have been used to make the system more effective. Instead, it was used to make spurious staff "efficiencies" so that ministers could present a reduced payroll as evidence of their success. As you point out, this often meant that the amount of saving was actually less than the tax lost through the very real inefficiencies which resulted.
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