Spending hours on phone trying to get HMRC to fix their wrong calculation and unwind all the incorrectly applied penalties. They are unbelievably bad.
Has anybody noticed that when you ask them why they haven't replied to a letter after more than 4 months they immediately (i.e. without even checking) say 'We have not received it, you need to send it again.' It was, however, delivered and signed for by their Newcastle 'address for couriers' and they are simply lying. Ask for their name and say you are going to submit a complaint and suddenly they can 'search the post system' and magically find that it was received but hasn't been looked at yet.
My blood pressure, which is normally a touch below 130/80 was more than 180/90 after the last conversation.
I'm collecting a list of 'tricks' that HMRC are currently using to rig their performance statistics, which I intend to pass on to my MP. A current favourite seems to be to start processing a claim and then dream up a idiotic/irrelevant question that they send via their outsourced (?) postal system and that takes a month to be printed and arrive. This tactic allows them to put the claim back at the end of the queue for processing and reset the clock on their performance figures.
