Taxmen overpay themselves £22m

Officials chase own colleagues to get cash back

BUNGLING tax inspectors overpaid themselves £22million over the past decade, it has emerged.

In the 2015/16 financial year alone, the salary blunders added up to £1.4million – or an average of almost £5,600 extra for each staff member.

The overpayments at the taxpayer’s expense – revealed by a Freedom of Information request – came after it emerged Whitehall waste has cost taxpayers at least £5.5billion in two years.

It leaves HM Revenue and Customs workers having to chase their own colleagues and former employees for the extra cash. Last night one MP described the mistakes by HMRC as ‘incredible’ and said it must claw back the money without delay.

The gaffes are acutely embarrassing for an organisation accused of taking an increasingly hard line against ordinary taxpayers. A record 143,000 penalties were handed out last year to people who had not taken ‘rea- sonable care’ to fill in their tax returns correctly.

Accountants complain that taxpayers are being penalised for innocent mistakes, such as forgetting to declare the interest on a long-lost savings account or omitting a health insurance policy or work gym membership.

In the latest Whitehall farce, 245 HMRC employees were overpaid more than £1,000 last year as a result of errors in the payroll department.

Charlie Elphicke, a Tory member of the Commons public accounts committee, said: ‘It’s incredible that staff are being overpaid in this way and HMRC needs to reclaim this money back as quickly as possible. This underlines how important it is for HMRC to up its game and keep on top of the numbers.’

John O’Connell of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘Taxpayers will want answers as to why HMRC has been overpaying its employees by mistake at their expense. These problems add to HMRC’s terrible track record of unanswered calls and repeatedly getting people’s tax code wrong.

‘It’s vital that HMRC moves to improve its services so that taxpayers can be sure the organisation is being run efficiently.’

Many of the staff who benefited from extra payments had left the organisation – but messages did not get through to payroll to halt their salary cheques. It is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the taxman. A damning report by the public accounts committee last month said HMRC’s failure to get tough with Britain’s richest individuals is undermining confidence in the entire tax system.

It criticised HMRC for collecting £1billion less tax from indi- viduals worth £20million or more, six years after setting up a task force to crack down on superrich tax dodgers.

The MPs accused the taxman of creating the impression that there was ‘one rule for the rich and another for everyone else’.

Last year the National Audit Office discovered more than three million people may have been paying the wrong amount of tax because of a computer meltdown at HMRC.

An HMRC spokesman said it has stringent measures to ensure overpaid money is recovered. He added: ‘HMRC takes the recovery of any overpaid salaries extremely seriously … that’s why we have reduced the amount overpaid year on year and last year recovered £1.9million in overpaid salaries.’

It emerged on Monday that ministers and officials blew £87 a second on failed projects and compensation, including deportation flights for failed asylum seekers that had to be cancelled because of a court ruling.

‘One rule for the rich’