Business banking news review: week ending 27 Nov 2014
The furore over the plan to let Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs to simply raid personal and business bank accounts has resulted in the Treasury stepping in.
For once, it looks like raising your voice and not letting go of an issue has paid off: the Treasury, which has likely grown tired of hearing about the issue, has decided to water down the new abilities of the taxman to rob the current accounts and savings accounts of Brits blind in an effort to recover unpaid taxes in excess of £1,000.
The Budget provided HMRC with the new powers earlier this year, and immediately red flags were raised by, well just about everyone. Banks and building societies, consumer advocacy groups, and even the Treasury select committee itself gave the taxman’s new powers the fish-eye, wondering if maybe, just maybe, this was simply too much power to put into the hands of a bunch of bureaucrats that have been tasked with the single job of taking as much money as possible out of the pockets of Brits and placing that money into Treasury coffers instead.
Well, the campaign against the new move, which essentially consisted of making Treasury’s life a living hell until it responded, has seemed to pay off. This week it said that it has decided to reduce the impact of these new cash seizure abilities by making it so that anyone who has been targeted for such action will have an actual in-person meeting with the taxman first, with a real life human being no less. Treasury says that doing this will provide everyone targeted by HMRC’s new powers a chance to either settle or challenge their bill before their bank accounts are raided unceremoniously.
Now this is likely the first good news bank account holders have heard in a dog’s age. If you ask me, the thought of HMRC being able to just rifle through my bank account like it belonged to it positively made my blood boil; I’m incredibly relieved to learn that at least those targeted by this still relatively vile new initiative can at least get a chance to speak up and defend themselves before just waking up one day, logging in to their online banking platform, and wondering where all their damned money went.