The ICO has at last allocated an official Number to our complaint about our HMRC tax record special categories FOIA request, submitted to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs back in January 2008.
Incredibly. it appears that HMRC still has not yet sorted out an online self assessment system via the Government Gateway, for people in these secret "special categories", nearly a year after the matter was first raised by a Member of Parliament.
One person who seems to be still suffering from this is the politically dissident former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.
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I have received a very curt letter from the Inland Revenue saying that, unless they receive my tax return for 2006/7 by tomorrow, they will start to charge me £60 per day fine. I would love to give them my tax return, but self-assessment returns are now only accepted online. But when I give them my Government gateway number, my Unique Tax Reference number, and my National Insurance number, the system still refuses to accept my existence.
This has been going on ever since I left the FCO. But in previous tax years you had the alternative of filling in a paper form, so I just did that. This option has been withdrawn.
I have called the Inland Revenue helpdesk on many occasions about this over the last four years, and they have told me that it is because I used to work for the FCO. Certain members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are blocked from online returns for security reasons (I cannot begin to imagine what). I point out it is four years now since I worked for them, but nothing happens.
In the meantime my tax for 2006/7 has been "assessed" - ie guessed - and I have paid the assessment in full. It is no secret that I am now a strugglling writer with, frankly, very little income. I am quite astonished at the effort they put into harassing me, especially when their system won't let me in to complete the form.
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