Every call was the same. “Call after call, all of them were totally distressed, some crying. If they were crying, I’d tell them to get a cup of tea and I would talk until they were ready to speak.

 

“They all said the same thing. Nurses, IT contractors, pilots, people from all walks of life, they all said, ‘I thought everything was fine, I checked it was HMRC-approved, I don’t know what I’ve done wrong’.”

 

This was how a volunteer for the Loan Charge Action Group described what it was like to answer the campaign group’s helpline, set up more than five years ago to help people who had been handed devastating tax bills by HM Revenue and Customs.

 

To HMRC, they are tax cheats who need to pay their fair share, but thousands of middle-income earners caught up in the effort to clawback more than £3bn insist they were none-the-wiser and were led astray by their advisers and employers.

But whoever is to blame, one thing is clear – the pursuit of unpaid taxes is causing widespread distress and MPs are now calling for the hunt to be called off. The debacle is also now being compared to the Post Office Horizon scandal.

More than 50,000 self-employed workers have been hit with crippling tax liabilities in HMRC’s pursuit of the loan charge, a controversial law linked to 10 suicides.

The loan charge was introduced in 2017 to target contractors – including nurses, IT workers and teachers – who had been paid their salaries via loan schemes.

 

Some workers claim they were told by agencies they had to be paid this way if they wanted to work for certain companies.

 

The loan charge can result in catastrophic bills. When it was first introduced, all the loans received by the contractor were treated as income for one year – meaning the tax was usually due at the top rate of 45pc.