Phoning the tax office

Have you ever tried phoning the tax office??!!


.................If you haven't - don't bother.


Phoning the tax office is an impossible task.  I know.  I tried to do it today.


The reason I was trying to phone the tax office was because they sent me a letter saying that I owed them £122 for the tax year ending 2012.  I was well cross about this because at the end of January I had sent them a cheque for £1600 (which apparently was what I owed them for tax year 2012/13 and what they thought I owed them up to July 2014.  And when I got my wage slip for January I had, had a tax refund of £110.


Do none of the different tax departments talk to each other?  Honestly, one would have thought that in this day and age of computers and technology, everything would have been cross referenced.


I'm really honest - but how the inland revenue people actually manage to catch anyone who is cheating the system is beyond me??!!  The saying 'couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery' springs to mind.


Anyway in an effort to get some kind of answer I decided that I would phone the tax office................


..................NOT a good idea.


Phoned the 0845 number provided on the top of my letter which was immediately answered by a machine.  The 'machine' was a robotic voice asking me stupid questions which I had to answer.  Voice recognition and all that?????????  After seven and a half minutes of answering robotic machines questions, swearing a lot and listening to robotic machine saying that a lot of the answers could be found on the website, robotic machine asked me five questions and established that my query came under the 'something else' category. At which point 'robotic machine' told me that my call would be answered shortly and switched on some music.  Every half a minute, 'robotic machine' said, 'Sorry for the delay, an advisor will be with you shortly'.


Well, after almost 5 minutes I heard 3 pips, robotic machine said, 'Sorry we cannot connect your call' and the phone went dead!!!!


To say I am furious is an understatement!!!


Do the tax people think we have nothing to do all day but hang around waiting for them to answer their phones?


So then I went onto their website to look for more contact details.


I'm not a stupid person I don't think but could I navigate my way around their website?  I could not.  The only phone number I could find was the one that I had just phoned, there doesn't seem to be any email address and the only postal address appears to be a PO box in Wales???????????


No wonder people have problems understanding the tax system.


They haven't even told me how or where or who to make a cheque out to, to pay the £122 that they say I owe them.  All the letter says is, 'For more information about how to pay go to hmrc.gov.uk/payinghmrc/selfassessment.htm


.................Well I went there and I couldn't make head nor tail of their complicated website.  In fact from what I could gather one can't pay on line unless one registers but how you do that is beyond me.  And anyway there's still quite a few people who don't have computers so what are they supposed to do?


All I want to do is speak to a real life person.  Is that really to much to ask???