In the middle of the festive period I received a cheery little missive from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) reminding me of the need to fill in my online tax return by 31 January and warning me of the dire financial consequences should I fail to do so.
This came shortly after an equally alluring invitation from NHS Scotland to participate in the Scottish Bowel Screening Programme, a service offered to people aged 50-74. I shall spare younger readers of a delicate disposition the details of what this involves. Suffice it to say that I decided to put the invitation on hold until I had negotiated the over-indulgence of Christmas. On the principle that ‘good’ news generally comes in threes, I fully expected that my festive joy would not be complete without a further irresistible offer, such as a summons to serve on a jury. However, so far, this has not materialised.
The HMRC letter was particularly interesting. It came in an envelope with a Cumbernauld address on the back. The letter itself was issued from a PO box in Cardiff. Enclosed was an envelope (requiring a stamp) which was to be used for any payment that I might have to submit: this time the address was the slightly sinister sounding ‘Section 1’, Bradford. I did consider sending a flippant reply pointing out that since England, Scotland and Wales had all received a mention, tax officers in Northern Ireland might feel left out and perhaps I could also be supplied with a point of contact in Belfast. The problem was: should such a letter be addressed to Cumbernauld, Cardiff or Bradford?
It is tempting to conclude that my experience is evidence of a deliberate policy to confuse taxpayers and make it difficult for them to get straight answers to any questions they might have. I suspect, however, that a senior tax official could give what seems to him (or her) a perfectly rational explanation for the surfeit of addresses.
The different offices will carry out different functions within a huge organisation responsible for the tax affairs of the whole nation. It makes sense to have certain operations centralised while others may need to be devolved to local offices. The trouble is that, from the perspective of individual citizens, the system seems decidedly user-unfriendly. In this respect, it merely reflects the practices of other large organisations, such as banks and utility companies, which place corporate ‘efficiency’ above convenience to clients (despite all the PR hype about ‘customer care’, ‘helplines’ and ‘service delivery’).
HMRC is a classic example of a bureaucratic organisation, the key characteristics of which were described a century ago by the German sociologist, Max Weber (1864-1920). These include a formal hierarchical structure, management by strict rules and impersonality in the making of decisions. Bureaucrats are expected to be remote, anonymous and not to display any distinctively human traits. As the central character in John Kennedy Toole’s marvellous comic novel, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, remarks: ‘You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces’. My ‘letter’ from HMRC was completely impersonal: the sender was ‘the system’, with no signature, or name, or even an official designation.
Bureaucracies have other characteristics, such as a tendency to expand and colonise new territory. In the present economic climate, the government is attempting to curtail this, though the drive to clamp down on tax dodgers and benefit cheats makes the aim difficult to achieve. Similarly, the promise to initiate a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ has turned out to be less straightforward than was first supposed.
An insatiable appetite for the gathering of information, without proper regard for the use to which it might be put, is another feature of bureaucracies. One of the reasons why the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States, J Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), was able to exercise malign power over successive political administrations for nearly 50 years, was that he systematically amassed damaging information (and disseminated misinformation) about important figures in public life.
Driven by a warped personal psychology, he presented himself as a stout defender of American values while promoting the interests of cronies and destroying the careers of those who dared to criticise him. The whole edifice depended on the tyrannical zeal with which he created and expanded his highly efficient organisation. He provides a stark example of the misuse of bureaucratic authority.
I shall, of course, get round to filling in my tax return before the cut-off date. First, however, I shall respond to the invitation from NHS Scotland, not least because I know someone whose bowel cancer was detected early and was successfully treated as a direct result of the screening programme. And, on reflection, maybe even a jury summons would not be such an unwelcome event. It might provide me with suitable material for a future SR article. The last time I wrote about the legal profession in these columns, my mildly critical observations provoked an irritated response from a retired sheriff. That’s what I call a result.
Walter Humes held professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde and West of Scotland and is now a visiting professor
of education at the University of Stirling
