Morale is currently low at HMRC and employees have now been warned that they are in for tough times ahead.
The chief executive of the Revenue, Lesley Strathie, informed staff that they need to be realistic about the challenges they face after the coalition announced the first round of public spending cuts.
There has already been much said about the tax coding blunder when HMRC migrated their records to a new system earlier this year. Now it transpires that they are also having problems with the continual changes to the pension rules.
The taxman recently conceded that the Revenue has lost track of its official data with the result that widespread problems are affecting some pension systems. HMRC has advised freelancers that some of the data they have provided should not be relied upon to be correct.
Andy Bell, the chief executive of AJ Bell, has written an open letter to George Osborne urging him to design a long-term and sustainable framework for the pension system that will encourage people to save in private schemes.
Over recent years, British savers have been lamenting the constant changes that the government has made to the pensions goalposts. One of the main gripes concerns the fee you have to pay for transferring a pension to another provider if you are dissatisfied.
The pensions debacle is just a further example of what happens when we have too many complex regulations.
And there may be yet more trouble ahead if the government scraps the 40% tax threshold on pensions. The Treasury would save £5.5bn a year by adopting this policy that was laid out in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.
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