Out-of-date taxman told to stop the presses
ANTIQUE printing machines still in use today by Revenue & Customs are a throwback to bygone days and should be abolished, the Office of Tax Simplification is urging.
The machines, which were made in the 1870s, are used to stamp transfer certificates for people who buy shares in paper form. The Victorian equipment is in a Revenue & Customs office in Birmingham.
The machines have to be shut down at 2pm every day to allow for them to be painstakingly cleaned in preparation for the following day. The OTS said there was a strong case for digitising the process, which originally began in 1694.
Revenue & Customs stamped 103,000 documents last year, and it can take more than a month for complex paperwork to be processed and dispatched.
In rare situations the stamp office will do a same-day stamping – but this is unusual and happens fewer than 50 times a year. The OTS report said: ‘This is only allowed if a taxpayer provides sufficient evidence that there is a business-critical reason for same-day stamping.’
Tax advisers find the process so frustrating that they sometimes use other methods to avoid sending documents away for stamping, but this can cost the applicant as much as £50,000.
On occasion foreign lawyers have questioned these methods, assuming they must be some kind of tax avoidance scheme. The OTS recommends a sameday digital procedure that would mean applicants are given a transaction reference number to show they had notified Revenue & Customs.
Company registrars would be allowed to amend their firm’s books once they had seen the reference number.
About half of the OTS’s recommendations are adopted.
A spokesman for the Treasury said: ‘The Chancellor will publish his response in due course.’