Tony Monger travels through time to get to the roots of the tax authority’s current ills.
In my 47-year career in taxes – 25 years in HMRC and 22 years in private practice – I have been asked many times if I knew how to evade taxation. I have always said that I had two answers and only two answers. But I have recently come up with a third.
But before I tell you my three answers I must draw your attention to the picture in this article. For those who don’t know, this is the remains of what once used to be Ty Glas Building in Llanishen in Cardiff, which is currently in the final stages of being demolished. Built in 1973, this is perhaps better known as the then Inland Revenue’s (later HMRC’s) Public Departments – or PDs as they were better known.
So called because they dealt with the taxation of the many Departments of the Civil Service that served the public. They dealt with the taxation of employees of the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Home Office, the Welsh Office, esoteric and little known organisations such as the Science Research Council and the Social Science Research Council, judges, court officials, MI5 and MI6: you name it, they taxed it.
Why, they even had a department that dealt with the taxation of the employees of the Inland Revenue itself (behind locked doors that only a very select few and trusted staff might enter). And there was also an ultra secret section that taxed spies – you know, the likes of James Bond whose files (or so legend had it) had no names or addresses, merely payroll numbers…
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