I feel the same underlying disquiet as Mr Eugenides who comments on this story too.
Nearly 200,000 people have informed on friends, colleagues and family to the taxman in the year since a confidential hotline was set up, The Times has learnt.
In just over a year, Revenue & Customs has received more than 155,000 telephone calls to its tax evasion hotline, 12,083 items of post (including faxes) and 17,952 e-mails. In addition, 3,819 referrals came from the Customs confidential hotline, set up in October 2005.
Like Mr E, I believe that as taxation is a legal requirement, then we should all pay our dues. I declare my income and pay what is owed – although this year, the Inland Revenue refunded me, so badly has business gone this past twelve months, but that’s another story.
While I firmly believe in the rule of law and that people should abide by that law, it is the state’s responsibility to detect and prosecute. It is all too easy to label snitchers as “concerned citizens” but what are they doing poking about in their neighbour’s business? It was this mentality that saw people reported to the Stasi as enemies of the state, that was parodied in Orwell’s 1984 where people guilty of thought crimes were reported to the authorities by their children. What next? Children encouraged to tell the state about what goes on in the privacy of their homes? Oh… Wait…
Welcome to snitch Britain.
Regarding the Tellus operation being run by OFSTED: My view is that this is an entirely unwarranted invasion of privacy. Worse, it is clear that OFSTED is now seeking to byppass all local control – from school management, governing bodies, local authorities upwards. Why is it necessary for a body which is charged with inspection of schools to acquire all this irrelevant information? And why does OFSTED believe it has the right to impose its demands directly on pupils? Very sinister indeed.
Absolutely. The questions are of a highly personal nature, deeply intrusive and none of OFSTED’s business.
What is even more nuts is that once you grass someone up, the government apparatchiks decide if they can be rrrsed to do anything about it.
I know a woman who has spent years trying to get the CSA to get the correct (and quite small) amount of child support from her ex husband. He avoids the issue by being slippery and cheating the revenue – I know this because he’s been foolish enough to brag about how he does it. She grassed him out of frustration as much as anything – and the CSA and Revenue have done exactly zero.
Yes but Revenue work on the basis of targets. So small fry are of no interest. If he’d avoided VAT to the tune of a couple of million they might have got off their arses.
As to CSA, well there’s absolutely no hope there. They are acknowledged by all to be completely incompetent.
Not only incompetent; lazy too. They concentrated on soft targets; those parents who were already paying; and then charged for their “services” leaving both parties worse off.