According to Accountancy Age this morning:
Staff at HM Revenue & Customs have set up a whistleblowing network to expose "errant bosses" at the department.
This is Money claims that the group, called Dissent, have 324 members and have presence in every office in the UK. It says it is "tired of the corruption, ineptitude and mismanagement from within the department in recent years".
The group told the Daily Mail: "We wish to speak out against the bad practice and double standards that operate in HMRC. We wish for a fair tax system that does not reward the wealthy elite and big business."
An HMRC spokeswoman said: "HMRC is proud to be an open organisation which welcomes and encourages the views of all our staff. Anonymous and unconstructive letters are therefore completely unnecessary and irrelevant. We have well defined procedures for staff to report any genuine grievances."
It's staggering that it's come to this.
But full marks to the brave people involved.
Hat tip: Eoin Clarke
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I’m going to put my head over the parapet and say that, as an old-school civil servant I don’t like the idea of the Dissent network.
I am not surprised that it has come to this. Successive governments have done their damnedest to erode the political neutrality of the Civil Service by their use of special advisors at management level. In some ways I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before that people at other levels should attempt to do the same.
But I still don’t like it.
Firstly, the neutrality of the civil service is a given within the unwritten constitutional settlement we have. In some ways the appearance of Dissent at least means the question now has to be put on the table about exactly what neutrality means (you might reasonably ask how neutral HM Treasury is). But it’s a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle once it is out: if the question is not addressed, there will be big, big trouble.
Secondly, if you want to know how badly a politicised civil service works, look at the USA. Or look at the nasty, corrupt little regime in Jersey. It is something you really do not want.
I see this as anti a politicised civil service
I see the whistleblower stopping the politicisation
Whistleblowing is something I do not have a problem with. In and of itself it is not a party political act.
But the existence of an organised network is another matter.
As I said, I’m not surprised, and I am sympathetic to the idea that the misdeeds of HMRC’s apparent use of one law for the rich are exposed and challenged – I want to see taxation applied fairly as much as you do.
But I still don’t like this development.