Juliet England: Phone calls to HMRC shouldn’t be taxing

Like many self-employed people, I spend much of January in a state of fevered anxiety. Not only is it the depths of post-festive flatness, with added credit card bills for extra kicks, not to mention price rises, and ghastly weather without the mince pies or above-average telly, but it’s also tax payment month.

This time around, due to an embarrassingly slouchy approach to early filing of the pesky return, a similarly cavalier approach to timely payment from some of my clients, and a woeful underestimation of how much the lickspittles would try and sting me for, the 2018 tax bill posed a more than usually bothersome cause for concern. And the deadline for payment was rapidly approaching.

To strangle PG Wodehouse, it’s never desperately difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a phone call to HMRC. I have got into distinctly tepid (if not actively scalding) waters with them before, and, via my textphone, they posed all manner of nosy questions. Do you have any savings? (None of your business.) Can your friends and family help? (Er, no. Definitely not. Why should they? I’d rather be dragged naked through Reading town centre on the last Saturday before Christmas than go snivelling to them.)

All in all, though, I tend to think of the tax guy as a firm but fair headteacher, forgiving as long as you don’t try and take your phone into class or sneak a sly fag behind the bike sheds.

But the prospect of contacting them again via the textphone, with the associated difficulties in terms of navigating the automated system on it, and the near impossibility of entering vital information such as my unique tax code, did not fill me with unmitigated delight.

Yet I also knew that of course I had to pay my dues and that the worst thing you can do when you owe money is nothing at all.

Praise the Lord, the tax authority does now have a shiny new online chat system. So I gladly (OK, OK, grudgingly) logged on, only to be told that my bill was indeed correct, and not an error or optical illusion. No decimal points were out of place. If I wanted more time to pay, I’d have to contact the debt collection hotline.

But I can’t do that, I whined, if it’s possible to whine while typing. My hearing isn’t up to it.

While the other person wasn’t totally unsympathetic, still there was nothing more to be done. And so I booked an appointment at my local deaf centre, where a phone call could be made on my behalf. The centre isn’t open daily, so I had to wait a few days before I could do anything.

As I strolled the 20-odd minutes there, I couldn’t help but reflect on the effort and planning involved in making a single phone call – a hearing person could just dial and talk.

Happily, the worker at the centre, who I hadn’t previously met, couldn’t have been lovelier or more helpful. Not that the communication wasn’t an uphill struggle at times.

I had to speak to the person on the other end of the phone to authorise the Nice Lady to speak to him on my behalf. The conversation had to be relayed to me at a glacial pace, bit by painful bit.

They did, however, give me a couple more months to cough up, on the understanding that I signed a direct debit instruction in blood. I had little choice but to agree.

To put this in place, I had to read out the relevant details from my bank card. I wasn’t allowed to authorise the Nice Lady to do that part. The problem was that I gabbled the numbers too quickly, so the Possibly Slightly Less Nice Man from HMRC couldn’t hear them – and I couldn’t hear him yelling at me to slow down. So it took a few attempts to get right, and even the Nice Lady was almost starting to roll her eyes.

Ultimately, it was all sorted out, and I was given the breathing space I needed. But all in all the whole thing took far longer and seemed far more officious than it should have done. You wonder why it isn’t possible simply to sort out what is after all a relatively straightforward matter via online chat.

After all, I know that I am far from the only person to feel flattened by their tax bill, and can’t believe I’m the only one in that situation with a hearing loss.

So even if all was OK ultimately, it left me feeling HMRC could probably do better. If I pay off my commitments early I need to let them know – by textphone. Press one if you are banging your own head against the wall in frustration. Press 2 if the government has changed while you’ve been kept dangling on the line.

Read more of Juliet’s articles for us here. Juliet England does freelance social media and PR work for cSeeker.