According to the Guardian, and I suspect that they have their source is right, the government is saying that the mailshot of tax statements to at least 24 million people in the UK will cost no more than £5 million.
I am sorry to say it, but I think that this is another lie about these tax statements to compound the misrepresentations that are already included within them.
Let's be clear: to believe this we have to presume that a programme to design, develop, check, download and then personally print, package, despatch and deliver these letters can all be done for 21p each. Bluntly, I don't believe that, even given the bulk of the operation. You might be able to do the print and despatch bit for that but if that's the full cost I would be utterly astonished.
Has anyone FoI's how that figure was calculated yet, or will I have to?
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It’s crazy – even the postage would cost more than that surely?
Maybe not in bulk….but with all the other costs I “don’t believe it” – just to prove I am a grumpy old man
Does the implicit annual financial industry support of c. £65billion a year come anywhere in the pie chart???
“A recent report from the International Monetary Fund demonstrated that the world’s largest banks still benefit from implicit public subsidies of up to $590bn because of their “too big to fail” status. UK institutions enjoy by far the most backing – $110bn – compared with the size of their host economy. Such analysis points squarely to the abject failure of post-crisis reforms designed to solve “too big to fail” – despite a vigorous bank lobbying campaign claiming it’s no longer an issue.” Liam Halligan, Daily Telegraph, 10/05/14
Staggering
May blog it tomorrow
You’re correct, Richard, the figure can’t be that low. But then again, I can’t believe that someone at the Treasury hasn’t sussed that it was bound to be queried, so they must have a ready-made response. In which case, it’ll be interesting to see what it is, because if they claim the figure for work of this scale and scope, with the preparation time and human resource that must have been devoted to it, has been accurately arrived at, then it suggests that other figures routinely touted as the costs for the work of government departments must be consistently overestimated. To which I’d add, given that this proposal was first flagged by Osborne in 2012 I assume that since then an IT application has been developed to crunch the numbers and so on, in which case, we should be told how much that cost.
Agreed
It should be very cheap to send one to any individual that completes a self-assessment return because they can just pop it in the same envelope as the self-assessment statement.
You really don’t need to pay anything for software that prints a pie chart.
Of course these views assume government will act in a logical way, which they probably won’t because if they intended to do so they would instead provide this as an on-line service instead which would cost almost nothing.
None of those things are happening
These are being printed and mailed separately
Your assumptions are as dodgy as George Osborne’s
We (Taxation magazine) reported on a Reform round table that discussed this when the proposal was first put forward by Ben Gummer. It was Chatham House rule, so no attribution or affiliation given, but included participants from government, business, the professions etc. The following in our report of the discussion is perhaps relevant;
“The idea of reducing costs by sending the forms out with other communications also increased the risks of statements being sent to the wrong taxpayer.
Although the cost of a mailing to all taxpayers was estimated at £7m, it was unclear whether this included the costs of producing the statements in the first place, and it definitely did not include the costs of answering the questions which would be generated by them.”