The letter, dated 18 January 2024, came from a company called Advantis.
“Dear Mr Simon Hattenstone,” it said, “Contact us about your unpaid HM Revenue and Customs balance of £1,778.31
It wasn’t directly threatening – it offered to help me find a way of paying off my debt. But the tone felt quietly menacing, with the line stating how much I owed in bold.
The letter did not explain what Advantis is, nor say what kind of tax I owed, or for what period.
I assumed it was connected to the payroll I’d started two years earlier for my mother’s two carers. But it didn’t use the word payroll, or say PAYE, anywhere.
In February, a report by the cross-party public accounts committee concluded that HMRC’s customer service was at an “all-time low”, and the tax authority appears to be “struggling to cope” with rising numbers of taxpayers and increases in complexity. The committee said it had received an unprecedented number of submissions about HMRC’s performance, “demonstrating the extent of taxpayers’ exasperation over the quality of services and the impact on businesses”.
I am one of those exasperated taxpayers.
This wasn’t the first time HMRC had set the debt collectors on to me. In October 2022, when I started the payroll, as I am financially illiterate but keen to do the right thing with finances and taxes, I did it through an accountant. In February 2023 I received my first bill from HMRC. I ignored it, thinking it must be a mistake, because who needs to pay tax after three months? (I said I was financially illiterate.) In March I received another, then in April I was informed I owed £3,069. By now I was worried. I belatedly got in touch with the accountant, who said the bill was for real and I could pay in instalments. Instead, I paid it off all at once.
That didn’t stop a company called BPO Collections getting in touch that May saying it was time to pay outstanding tax .
After a huge amount of stress – including an HMRC officer telling me “BPO Collections don’t exist. It looks as if you’ve been scammed” – HMRC admitted that a) BPO Collections did indeed exist, and b) this outstanding tax wasn’t actually outstanding because I’d paid it two weeks before BPO sent out its letter. The officer said I’d been unlucky in the way the dates fell.
Unlucky. A one-off, I assumed.
But fast-forward to 18 January 2024 – three weeks after my mother had died, and more than a week after my accountant had advised me to pay the remaining tax I owed on Mum’s payroll so that all debts were settled. I’d done that immediately, but now here was this letter, seeming to say I hadn’t.
Last time, I ended up going to HMRC’s press office because I couldn’t get a straight answer from either HMRC customer services or BPO Collections and because I was writing about my experience in the Guardian’s Money section. This time, I couldn’t face being shunted from department to department – I went straight to the press office. Mum was newly dead, I’d done everything by the book, and here I was being threatened again over money I didn’t owe.