Grumpy Oldie Man
It’s tax return time – when my heroic accountant keeps me out of jail
If a neighbour tipped off the police that I have multiple corpses secreted on the premises, and Scotland Yard sent 97 officers with infra-red equipment, sniffer dogs and three medium-sized JCB diggers to investigate, they could not search this house as diligently as I have these past few months.
The object of this search isn’t human remains, as it happens. Even for a middle-aged amnesiac such as myself, recalling where I left those would be a doddle. The police tending to be literalists, it needs categorically stating that I am not a serial killer.
Away from Her Majesty’s highways, I can’t remember committing any criminal offence, though more through cowardice than any compelling moral code. But in the absence of a financial document so antiquated that it bears the name of Abbey National, this record has been placed in jeopardy.
According to my most beloved accountant, Robin, who is necessarily a stickler, my tax return cannot be filed until the interest paid on this account is known. I have pointed out to him many times that the account has been unused for 20 years (hence the last sighting of the paying-in book before the turn of the millennium); and that the amount in it was so minute that, in an age of ultra-low interest rates, the interest accruing couldn’t be more than a matter of pence. Each time, he has pointed out that the amount is irrelevant, and that accuracy is a legal requirement.
Each time, I have countered that I will pay the Revenue an obscenely inflated sum – £5, or even £10 – with no objection if Philip Hammond wishes to spend the surplus on a schooner of medium-sweet sherry wine down the pub, or put it towards a gold-lamé posing pouch. Each time, Robin has counter-countered that, with a tax return, total accuracy is a strict legal requirement.
We last reprised this haiku a fortnight ago when I visited his offices in Marylebone for our traditional game. I tip a carrier bag full of unopened financial letters onto his desk. He opens them with his trusty envelope knife in the quest for bank statements and the like.
‘Have you found that Abbey National booklet?’ asked this man of heroic patience after restricting himself to a muted sigh on opening an 18-month-old urgent request for financial information from himself. I had not. ‘Well, I really do need it,’ he said. ‘Look, can’t we just say the interest came to £9.28 and be done with it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, they can hardly complain if I pay more than I owe, can they?’
Sighing again, more audibly, he said that they could.
On no account, even an ancient Abbey National Super Saver, would I dismiss the good people of HM Revenue & Customs as fools. Dealings with them down the years have been blessedly few, and that pattern needs to continue.
The last encounter, about a dozen years ago, concerned my wife. An inspector became suspicious about a cheque she’d written for some £3,500. For whatever reason, he couldn’t decipher the recipient. Plainly, he reckoned she was hiding income in a secret account or laundering money for one of the less ambitious Medellín cartels.
After plaguing her with increasingly menacing communications for six months, the mystery was solved. Whether this vindicated her or not, who can say? But she had made the cheque out to HM Revenue & Customs in settlement of an income tax demand.
What the hours wasted by that public servant cost the honest taxpayer I have no idea. But I can estimate what the hunt for the Abbey National booklet has cost me – not in my own time, which is worthless, but in the hours the cleaning lady has spent rifling fruitlessly through drawers, carriers and the brace of document-stuffed cardboard boxes that moonlight as a filing system.
Yesterday, after seven unproductive visits to various branches of Santander (these Spaniards appear to have subsumed Abbey National without having the common courtesy to let me know), the 18th conversation with a call centre did the trick. Why all previous 17 efforts failed is beyond me, though the lack of the account number and inability to recall the postcode of the old address to which it was registered may have played a part.
In an epiphany of blinding clarity that ridiculed Robin’s suggestion about a course of regressive hypnotherapy, the postcode came back to me. As, after placing me on hold for a refreshing quarter hour, did the voice.
‘Right, I see what’s happened,’ it said. ‘Because the account was inactive for so long, it’s become dormant. That’s why it’s been so difficult to trace.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ I said, pretending to understand. ‘So if you’d just tell me how much interest was paid up to 5th April this year?’
‘Well, as I said, the account is dormant,’ it went on, curiously in the tone of someone addressing an eighth-wit at best. ‘Aha. And that means?’ ‘What it means,’ it replied, ‘is that no interest has been paid on it at all.’