WAMT....what annoyed me today!

DorsetDude said:
Maybe they were semaphore workers? Or military personnel marching?
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Lol semaphore would mean the hands up in the air :)

I doubt the people involved this morning would have passed the fitness tests ;)
 
Nod said:
John Hancock is Americanese for a signature.
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Yep :-) He was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independance, and his signature was the largest and "flounciest". :-)
 
viv1969 said:
Yep :) He was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independance, and his signature was the largest and "flounciest". :)
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Agreed so I'm not quite following @Nod 's point that ( why) I should write my full name in the artificial snow.
 
So nobody eats it! It would serve them right for putting showy decorations outside way too early. If your signature is anything like mine, it's pretty much illegible so you wouldn't be giving anything away.
 
Sitting at my desk wondering why my laptop was not charging


Best turn the power on then :oops: :$:p
 
Keith W said:
Sitting at my desk wondering why my laptop was not charging


Best turn the power on then :oops: :$:p
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On a positive note, be glad it wasn't a duff battery :)
 
Nod said:
So nobody eats it! It would serve them right for putting showy decorations outside way too early. If your signature is anything like mine, it's pretty much illegible so you wouldn't be giving anything away.
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I wasn't aware artificial snow was edible.
 
WAMT - Osbourne announcing he wants to remove mens rea for tax evasion and make it a strict liability offense.
Quite worrying, as this sets a precedent for more offences to be tried on a strict liability basis - and this bodes very ill for our judicial system.
 
Kitchen re-fit due to start today. Emptied cupboards especially. Total chaos everywhere. Now things aren't starting until tomorrow. :mad:
 
Llamaman said:
WAMT - Osbourne announcing he wants to remove mens rea for tax evasion and make it a strict liability offense.
Quite worrying, as this sets a precedent for more offences to be tried on a strict liability basis - and this bodes very ill for our judicial system.
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Au contraire, I think it's an excellent move. It's exactly the same approach that is taken with regard to doping in athletics, and the effect there is that athletes are very very very careful to ensure that they don't accidentally ingest, or allow someone to give them, anything which is banned. Err on the aside of caution. I assume the Government wants individuals and corporations to be similarly careful with regard to their tax matters.
 
srichards said:
Kitchen re-fit due to start today. Emptied cupboards especially. Total chaos everywhere. Now things aren't starting until tomorrow. :mad:
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First rule of building projects: If it starts by the time you had originally expected it to finish, you're doing well. Sounds like you're doing well.
 
StewartR said:
Au contraire, I think it's an excellent move. It's exactly the same approach that is taken with regard to doping in athletics, and the effect there is that athletes are very very very careful to ensure that they don't accidentally ingest, or allow someone to give them, anything which is banned. Err on the aside of caution. I assume the Government wants individuals and corporations to be similarly careful with regard to their tax matters.
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will this have an impact on grey importing ? Presumably under strict liability it won't be a defence to a charge of evading VAT to say " I didnt know the supplier was goig to ship it marked as toy parts" or " I didn't realise it wasnt a UK supplier " etc or does the removal of mens rea only apply specifically to avading income tax ?
 
StewartR said:
Au contraire, I think it's an excellent move. It's exactly the same approach that is taken with regard to doping in athletics, and the effect there is that athletes are very very very careful to ensure that they don't accidentally ingest, or allow someone to give them, anything which is banned. Err on the aside of caution. I assume the Government wants individuals and corporations to be similarly careful with regard to their tax matters.
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If the rule book is easy to understand, and unambiguous then I would agree. Unfortunately that is just not the case, not even close.
 
StewartR said:
Au contraire, I think it's an excellent move. It's exactly the same approach that is taken with regard to doping in athletics, and the effect there is that athletes are very very very careful to ensure that they don't accidentally ingest, or allow someone to give them, anything which is banned. Err on the aside of caution. I assume the Government wants individuals and corporations to be similarly careful with regard to their tax matters.
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Inappropriate analogy. Professional sport is an opt-in system, and the sanction for breaching the rules is exclusion from the system. You don't get to opt in or out of criminal law and the penalty is incarceration.

I'm not comfortable with people making honest mistakes facing prison - the tax system is complicated and full of grey areas - mistakes or differences of opinion are inevitable and this response is disproportionate to the 'mischief'.

You post infers corporations are not currently careful about their tax affairs - from my experience that is simply not true. Most companies are compliant with the law even though HMRC have nowhere near enough resources to ever hope to investigate a fraction thoroughly.

This isn't about encouraging more care (there are already financial penalties to deal with that on a sliding scale of severity of carelessness/negligence - a proportionate response to the mischief) but to strong-arm taxpayers with complicated affairs to overpay their tax to avoid the risk of Justice WantsAPeerage taking an alternate view and tossing the SAO in the slammer.

Parliament needs to stop abrogating its responsibility for tax law by blaming everyone else for their failure to write a tax code that is clear, fair and consistent.

You also appear to assume that this will be limited to tax affairs. I think that's extremely unlikely once the precedent is set. Future ministers faced with public outrage over some event or scandal and prompted to react with knee-jerk legislation will see this as a way of being 'zero tolerance'.

It's an attack on one of the fundamental standards of our criminal legal system; acteus reus & mens rea.
The fact that these terms are in Latin should give some indication of their historical importance to judicial systems, and why all legal systems of a good standard feature them.
 
big soft moose said:
will this have an impact on grey importing ? Presumably under strict liability it won't be a defence to a charge of evading VAT to say " I didnt know the supplier was goig to ship it marked as toy parts" or " I didn't realise it wasnt a UK supplier " etc or does the removal of mens rea only apply specifically to avading income tax ?
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We've yet to see the detail, but it seems it will apply to income tax and corporation tax so I would be surprised if they didn't add VAT.
(Cross-border) VAT is notoriously complicated and heavily determined by case law so that'll be mayhem. Owners of small businesses might be well advised to move to Scotland to be on the safe side :D
 
Network printer being a bitch and taking far longer than it should have to get sorted
 
WAMT - The cowardly, treacherous SNP. Disgrace and embarrassment.
 
Bloody combi boiler going on the blink, dug the manual out and managed to get it going again though

Hoping it is nothing major and was just a blip
 
It's in league with the printer. The computers are rebelling!
 
Llamaman said:
Much more succinct than my rant :)
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Purely because I don't have your detailed knowledge on that subject :thumbs: many years ago I may have worked for that department and we did create personas we interact with. This approach seems to follow and focus on only of those personas; the one where someone will be "willfully uncompliant".

It is very nasty and dangerous when everyone is approach as doing what they do on purpose. Heck if many politians can't distinguish between avoidance and evasion what chance does an ordinary tax paying resident stand against the interpretation skills of a civil servant.

Very dangerous situation indeed.
 
Keith W said:
Bloody combi boiler going on the blink, dug the manual out and managed to get it going again though

Hoping it is nothing major and was just a blip
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Don't forget to check the pressure in the system, sometimes after bleeding radiators the pressure can get too low for it to fire up. At least ours does that.
 
Late night shopping. Makes parking an nightmare and would mean Mrs Nod being in town (shopping, probably - for herself, not gifts!) for an extra hour to ensure she had a space. Easier for me to drop her down 1/2 an hour before her class starts then pick her up at 21:30.
 
dejongj said:
Don't forget to check the pressure in the system, sometimes after bleeding radiators the pressure can get too low for it to fire up. At least ours does that.
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That's what I thought it was initially, wasn't that though

Much reading of the manual and tinkering I ended up doing a total re-set of the whole system
 
Llamaman said:
Inappropriate analogy. Professional sport is an opt-in system, and the sanction for breaching the rules is exclusion from the system. You don't get to opt in or out of criminal law and the penalty is incarceration.
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Fair point.

Llamaman said:
I'm not comfortable with people making honest mistakes facing prison - the tax system is complicated and full of grey areas - mistakes or differences of opinion are inevitable and this response is disproportionate to the 'mischief'
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Fair point, up to a point. But it's already possible to go to jail for along time on the basis of an honest mistake - "I thought she was 16" doesn't cut any ice in court. Sure, that's a very different application, where the law is simpler, but the principle already exits that you can go to jail for making an honest mistake.

The real issue here is the complexity of the tax system and the multitude of opportunities for mistakes. But it's ironic that the tax system is so complicated precisely because individuals and corporations always seek to game it. Simplification of the tax system is surely desirable, but realistically that cannot be achieved unless it is clear that transgressions will be punished very severely.

Llamaman said:
You post infers corporations are not currently careful about their tax affairs - from my experience that is simply not true. Most companies are compliant with the law even though HMRC have nowhere near enough resources to ever hope to investigate a fraction thoroughly.
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I'm happy to defer to your experience here. My impression is that companies will do whatever they can to exploit the tax system legally, and currently if some of their actions are slightly the wrong side of the line then they don't face much of a sanction. Perhaps making the sanctions bigger would encourage some of them not to skate on such thin ice.

Llamaman said:
This isn't about encouraging more care (there are already financial penalties to deal with that on a sliding scale of severity of carelessness/negligence - a proportionate response to the mischief) but to strong-arm taxpayers with complicated affairs to overpay their tax to avoid the risk of Justice WantsAPeerage taking an alternate view and tossing the SAO in the slammer.
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Maybe. I don't have a problem with people being strong-armed into simplifying their tax affairs. As I said above, that's necessary if we want to simplify the system.

Llamaman said:
Parliament needs to stop abrogating its responsibility for tax law by blaming everyone else for their failure to write a tax code that is clear, fair and consistent.
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Maybe, but that's not a helpful attitude. There has been an arms race over decades (if not longer) whereby individuals and corporations have been trying to outwit the intent of Parliament, and Parliament has responded by trying to close the loopholes. It would have been better to clamp down hard on evasion and avoidance long ago, but that wasn't done. Unfortunately it's led to the position whereby a 'clear, fair and consistent' tax system would just be abused.

Llamaman said:
You also appear to assume that this will be limited to tax affairs. I think that's extremely unlikely once the precedent is set. Future ministers faced with public outrage over some event or scandal and prompted to react with knee-jerk legislation will see this as a way of being 'zero tolerance'.
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Yes I do assume that. My glass is generally half full..

Llamaman said:
It's an attack on one of the fundamental standards of our criminal legal system; acteus reus & mens rea.
The fact that these terms are in Latin should give some indication of their historical importance to judicial systems, and why all legal systems of a good standard feature them.
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Fair point. But it's not the first attack. Environmental offences, age-related offences and traffic offences don't require mens rea, and there's no big fuss about that. I personally don't see why tax offences can't be treated similarly, though I can respect the position of those who disagree.

Thanks for an interesting debate.
 
A few years ago, I went into the local tax office with my forms and all necessary supporting documentation/calculations/figures and asked where assorted figures should be put on the form. Over an hour and several tiers of staff later, I was asked to come back in in a few days when they knew... From what I can gather from people who either still work for HMR&C or have recently retired, nothing's changed.
 
Keith W said:
Bloody combi boiler going on the blink, dug the manual out and managed to get it going again though

Hoping it is nothing major and was just a blip
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I'm currently familiar with boiler issues.
Hope you sort it simply soon.
I see heating in my future :-)
 
Yup, HMRC have deskilled a lot. And it won't get any better - working conditions are poor, the final salary pension gone and the salary less than outside HMRC.
So they can't recruit outsiders (poachers turned gamekeepers), or easily recruit the best candidates from university.
 
nilagin said:
Sidelights are ok if they are large enough to be seen. It's those pesky silly little side lights that are barely noticeable that cars had years ago but some Japanese makes seem to still insist on fitting.
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Like mine, that are in the main beam housings - the ones that are in the inside of the headlight clusters and only about 2' apart from each other! Mind you, I'd rather that than the current Euro trend of blinding LED strips .
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
ind you, I'd rather that than the current Euro trend of blinding LED strips .
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And the increasing habit of lorries lighting themselves up as Christmas trees!
I drive a lot in the dark mornings, in country type and or at least un-lit roads.
You see one of those coming around a bend at you at 5am ..... Its close encounters of the 3rd kind, re-enacted.

I'm never sure if I'm gonna get hit or abducted :D
 
Gremlin said:
Someone else can do the abducting, but I'm willing to volunteer to do the hitting
whipping.gif
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Yeah I've heard about you ....
Ms "St Claire"
:p
 
Cobra said:
And the increasing habit of lorries lighting themselves up as Christmas trees!
I drive a lot in the dark mornings, in country type and or at least un-lit roads.
You see one of those coming around a bend at you at 5am ..... Its close encounters of the 3rd kind, re-enacted.

I'm never sure if I'm gonna get hit or abducted :D
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It's not the abduction that hurts...

















...it's the probing!:p
 
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