Following my recent posts on the nature of money, there has been some discussion on the nature and usefulness of cash in the comments. The suggestion has been made that my indifference to cash is contrary to my concern for funding the future. I commented in response this morning and thought it worth making my position clear more generally:
This blog is about funding the future. If you had asked me in the 90s whether I thought cash would have had a role in that I would have said “I hope not”.
As an accountant I refused, pretty much, to ever account for businesses that handled cash. They were costly, uncontrolled, unreliable and frankly too commonly criminogenic in nature to take the risk of being associated with, not least because of the risk of Revenue investigation, which was real in those days.
I have worked very hard to eliminate cash from economies for this reason. So, I demanded the end of big denomination notes.
I demanded evidence of source for large deposits.
And, of course, the control of suitcases of cash in tax havens.
But I have also demanded increased transparency of banking in general to tax authorities, whilst seeking that platforms like eBay and Amazon be open to HMRC.
I believe in tax justice. Cash and opacity are its enemies. Nothing will change my position.
But I don't need to change my position. People do not want cash. I would have thought the reasons why are obvious.
And there isn ‘t an honest business owner who is not delighted to put up the sign saying ‘card only'. Cash is a nightmare to manage, and costly too, because of the risks. Of course they also want to be rid of it.
This blog is about funding the future. And cash has no part in it.
Does that give me a civil rights concern? No. That concern does not come from the absence of cash. It comes from authoritarianism.
Does it give me an exclusion concern? Yes, but only because we need to guarantee digital and basic banking inclusion for everyone. Labour tried that in 2019. It is not doing so now. That is where your problem is.
But will I change my mind on cash? No, because it will be a memory soon and has no role in funding the future.
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Living in the Republic of Ireland, cash is widely used although banks are reducing the number of ATMs and these are being replaced by specialists like Brinks.
Charity boxes now have card readers fitted to allow card giving.
In the U.K., my elderly mother in law uses cash to allow her Home Help to shop for her.
All is change.
The DWP is trying to bring in a new law allowing it to trace how PIP payments are spent.
A cashless society will allow this.
Do you agree that the DWP should be allowed to do this?
There appear to be three of these comments
As somone who has lived for forty years knowing I have to justify every penny into and out of my accounts to prove I am not frauduent what is the problem with this?
Sorry, I put it on two different threads as it seemed relevant to both. No idea where the third came from.
PIP is tax-free, so why should someone claiming PIP have to justify it? They justify it by the DWP accepting the claim. It’s hard to get it in the first place.
Lots of people claiming PIP or having it claimed for them are not capable of filling in all the forms as it is.
In previous threads you felt sorry for pensioners who will have to fill in tax forms for the first time. Why do you not feel sorry for PIP claimants having to justify where they spent their money and what on?
I do feel sorry for people
But, do you have evidence of how this power is used?
I’m really not sure what the DWP thinks it’s going to learn from doing that. My PIP goes into our joint account along with our other pensions. How do you identify on what, specifically, the PIP is spent ? Sounds a bit like a typical government dead cat.
The notes I have read suggest they are not looking at what anything is spent on but are looking for excess savings over allowed limits.
I like the idea of a cashless society in principle. So now is the time to consider the possible abuses of a digital currency to ensure that they can’t happen. Big Brother is watching us.
A digital currency makes little difference to this
We already have an almost whlly digital money systen
You have laid out many of the cons of cash, especially from the more nefarious side of life. There are pros though.
Some people find it much easier to budget by using envelopes and stashing away cash for specific reasons, so that they viscerally know how much they have left.
I remember as a 4 or 5yo going into sweet shops with a few pennies. Are you really suggesting 4yos carrying a card?
Cash provides a natural limit to what can be stolen, but electronic money has literally no limit. It is technically possible (but obviously very hard) to steal all the money from the country if a coordinated attempt was made using the inevitable bugs in the programming of the various banks. Obviously such an attack would not be able to use the money, but it would completely disrupt the functioning of the country for a while.
More likely (although still very difficult) could be hacking a payment device, then walking through a busy underground station, automatically stealing little amounts from anyone that you pass within NFC distance of. This is just like how you tap your card in a shop without inputting any authorisation – it is just relying on the checkout being correctly programmed not to ask for more or even not to ask when it shouldn’t. This is just code so can be hacked.
Electronic money also absolutely relies on 24/7 100% reliable nationwide power. If Ukraine, for example, or Gaza, only had electronic money, it would be frequently unusable due to lack of electricity.
Shall we stick to reality?
I live in a very rural location. If during bad weather, the power goes out, it usually stays out for several days. And even when there are no powercuts, mobile phone signal is so poor it regularly makes market traders’ portable card payment units not usable. I think your reality might be that it’s easy to think cash isn’t needed when one lives a reasonably affluent urban life. Here, there have been plenty of occasions when cash was the only way to buy essentials during several days.
I live in a rural area where such things happen.
I knew all about the unreliability of power supply and quite frequent power cuts when I lived in Norfolk, but less here. But I know such things are common 8n this area.
But they are the issue to be dealt with, and cash is not the answer to them. Investment is.
I broadly agree with you about cash but my concern is over the other elements you mention – how the new ‘virtual world’ of our money will be managed and exploited by those who enable us to access it, the more we do not actually handle it.
My concerns are such that I would like to see cash last as long as it can. I simply have no faith that a cashless world will be safe and equitable in the world we inhabit now or in the direction we are going.
Put simply, the foxes are in charge of the hen coop. I’m sorry but that is where we are.
I am not sure that the small amount of remaining cash makes any difference to that now
According to the BoE there is £70 billion in notes in circulation, twice as much as a decade ago.
I think it exceeds £80bn
Much is not in circulation. It is high value notes most people never see.
Most coins do not circulate either.
“According to the BoE there is £70 billion in notes in circulation, ”
I suspect that would be “political donations”. There’s probably a similar number of brown envelopes.
Do ypu know how hard it is to bank cash now?
I don’t doubt your point at all in a world where credit dominates in property and car loans (and god knows what else).
From where I’m looking from, the small amount of cash passing through my hands at least gives me a sense of agency – even though through electronic means I can buy a blogger a much deserved coffee today for an excellent post!
Up on high, the numbers look different – even though it seems to me to dominated by debt and assets – not day to day living (although credit card use has gone up for that in the CoLC – but only because wages had dropped I imagine). But from where I am, cash has a lots of uses.
I remain worried – having read Zubhoff, seen another ‘wire fraud’ (FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried) the less tangibility money will have, the potential for abuse will increase.
To me its not about the letting go of cash – it’s about who is in charge when we completely do so.
We have done so
A very long time ago
Cash is a tiny side show
I just don’t get the reaction to what I have said
Richard
I know exactly how hard it is to bank cash. I have always saved ‘spare cash’ to use at Christmas. This week I took 10 bags of coins to the local post office and paid it into my bank account. Took about 3 minutes, including queueing.
They limit you to 10 bags per visit.
Politely, no you don’t and trying to draw an analogy between that and business banking is crass. I thought we had a high level of comment here. Frankly, right now the comments on this issue, which are so ill informed and so ill thought through make me feel like closing the comments for good. I really do have better things to do with my life if this what they are going to descend to.
As you know, I disagree. Not everything is business. Ordinary people, their freedom, their privacy, their interests matter. In pursuit of criminality you are enabling the authoritarians. Decency in Government depends not on your intentions, but what tools are given to those unknown, often less decent people who climb the greasy pole into Government. We disagree. I shall leave my protest there. I have made my case on another thread.
I am sorry to say this John, but to suggest that I am enabling authoritarians is really quite offensive and utterly untrue. I really did no expect that from you.
I did not claim you intended it, but I do think it is an unintended consequence of your position. I confess I simply do not understand your position on this argument. It seems focused purely on a perception of from a business perspective, and under the rules of a company audit. Not every individual using cash is a crook. Everybody is entitled to privacy, including their financial affairs.
At the same time, on what grounds are the banks entitled to expect our confidence? They blew that spectacularly in 2007, and have not earned forgiveness. They have been given a sovereign pardon they did not, and do not, deserve. My confidence in my bank extends solely to the extent a guarantee is given to money in an account, by the Government; and no further. The same applies if I changed to any other bank, and that again would be, mutatis mutandis, under the same conditions.
I promised not to respond further here, and did not intend to; but you took offence, for which I am sorry, but it obliged a response, and I still think there was, in the context of my explanation, cause. You asked on another thread, why I was so ‘heated’; it was because I always though you had a bias against cash; but I just cannot understand why you are so fatalist and complacent about those who use cash, for perfectly justified reasons (although why they have to justify them is beyond me).
For the record, I rarely use cash. But I recognise I am now living waist deep in a financial sewer, and am obliged to hold my nose, or buy a nosegay.
Thank you.
We will have to agree to disagree, although I will note that you seem not to have understood almost a word I have said and imply things I have never suggested.
More pompous bleatings ..what about the old who only trust cash and do not want to be part of the digital age..think before you tap away FFS
I said it is disappearing
I did not say it is gone
It will go when those with that attitude die
It’s really not hard to work out
Whilst I understand the concerns of a cashless society, surely cash only existed because it was a convenient method of using “money”. If the concerns of cashless systems are that the controls are open to abuse, (of course use of cash is also abused) then we need to devise a system that can address this (maybe bitcoin type?).
I agree that cash is outdated, and monetary reforms should be concerned with a future robust cashless system
Bitcoin is totally traceable – that is what an open ledger means
Reform is what is needed
The DWP want to trace every transaction that PIP claimants make. They are wanting to bring in a law to allow it.
A cashless society will make that very easy for them. Do you think that is right?
Do you think fraud is right?
Tax already requires that a person be abloe to account for all their transactions
In the same article I read that 1% of PIP is claimed fraudulently and most of that is by accident.
So you think that all PIP claimants should suffer because of that?
My grandson claims PIP. Because he can’t cope with money very well it gets paid to his mum.
Should the DWP be able to look at her bank account to see how she spends her money? It’s quite a legal way to claim PIP.
At the moment what the DWP are doing is putting all PIP claims online. Ipswich is one of the areas where they are trying out this scheme.
PIP is non-contributary, tax-free and non-means- tested.
It’s very difficult to get, so I would think difficult to defraud the DWP.
It’s quite sad that you see fraud everywhere.
Do I think the DWP have the right to prevent fraud?
Yes, of course I do.
And experience tells me fraud is commonplace. Much more in tax than the benefits system, but everywhere.
So of course I support measures to control it. Would you seriously expect me to say otherwise? Being left of centre is not to be indifferemnt to abuse, wherever it happens.
My husband once designed an extension for someone who worked in London in tax fraud.
When my husband told him how much it would cost he was asked if that included tax. Of course it did. My husband was told they were not after the little people like him. He wanted a discount. So my husband tore up the drawings in front of him.
I agree with my husband about tax fraud. But I don’t agree with the government being able to look at anyone’s account to see how they spend their money.
It’s hard enough for anyone on PIP to try and live a life like other people without putting more obstacles in their way.
The Revenue have the right to ask for my bank accounts
Is that fair?
While I don’t doubt JenW’s statement about the DWP, it seems an odd thing to want to do. As far as I know a PIP is never someone’s sole source of income, it is an addition to other income (which could be different benefits). It is impossible to trace which expenditure relates to which income within an account having multiple payments both in and out.
It’s my 21 year old grandson’s sole source of income. He has autism and although people are willing to let him volunteer to work for them, nobody will give him a job or even an apprenticeship.
PIP is not only tax-free but it also does not depend on what other income the person has.
So how does being able to check up on what people spend it on by looking into their bank accounts stop fraud, unless the DWP are going to say exactly what it should be spent on?
I haven’t said it is happening, but the DWP want to bring in a law to make it happen, so obviously it’s not possible to give examples.
However, with this government you need to stop them bringing in unjustifiable laws.
PIP is necessary, and usually inadequate.
But, the DWP need when they think the system might be abused to be able to prove if a person’s lifestyle is consistent with the need to make a claim.
One way to do that is to review their spending patterns. It is not the only way. It is one way.
To answer the question all I have to do is imagine standing at the Despatch Box arguing that this law was not needed. I cannot imagine politicians on any side supporting that. Government needs powers to uphold the law. No one sys it need use them very often.
I think this law is justifiable to prevent abuse. We will have to disagree.
https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/kunena/10-dla-esa-queries-results/144042-bank-accounts-checked-monthly-by-dwp#285008
Having a power and using it are nit the same thing
Monthly checks are simply not going to happen.
http://www.thenational.scot/news/23903863.dwp-plan-monitor-benefit-claimants-bank-accounts/
Not just PIP, although I got the link through a PIP site originally.
I presume if the banks are going to be asked to this monthly, they will be paid by the government to do it.
It’s wrong. It will cost them more than giving money to families in poverty.
This is hardly monitoring what people are spending
It’s checking their savings limits, as the law requires claimants to declare
I think enough has been said on this now.
I can’t remember when I last used cash. It was pre-COVID, but I don’t know when.
Some shops impose a minimum amount for card payments, (£3 or £5) but I normally avoid those shops.
The only issue I have with a cashless society is the banks and the government and how they will abuse the situation. That and the way that without proper banking facilities open to all many people would be cut out of society.
Get the second point right and cash will go the way of the Gold Standard.
That point on inclusion is key
I wish Labour yelled about it some more
I agree with you to a point, until it’s hacked or bad software update. Lagarde has recognised this surely? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2021/html/ecb.sp211014~0ebead6ce2.en.html
Marcus
In rural areas the needs for cash has all but disappeared along woth cash points and branch banking.
It must be becoming increasingly difficult of the estimated 1.3 million ‘unbanked’ adults in the UK.
We ned to concentrate on their inclusion
When I moved to this village 13 years ago we had three banks. Now all there is is a part-time post office, which was there as well as the banks, with an ATM that doesn’t work for much of the time.
Richard,
What sort of business’s that take cash would you work for?
A lot of retail is still cash – my local chippy is cash only, although interestingly enough a log supplier I used in the past was subsequently convicted of buying stolen property and he worked in cash
As I said, basically none
Even in the 90s
For the last few years I have made almost all payments via my mobile phone and I have welcomed this facility. Cash still has its uses though and here in Devon where we no longer have banks and cash machines it is necessary to keep a quantity of cash available.
Card and phone payments need internet connections and/or mobile phone signals and an electricity supply. The recent storms here have demonstrated the vulnerability of relying only on electronic payments. On many occasions our local Spar shop/post office can only accept cash transactions.
I agree that cash use is declining Electronic card payments are quick and easy. Paying cash into a business account is not easy or free. Even paying cash into a personal account at the Post Office, there bring no bank branches left in the town, is not easy with a transaction limit of £2k. Although the system seems to allow another transaction immediately afterwards, so what is the point of limit?
I do like to use cash in the pub however, as money spent there is not identifiable on the joint bank statement!
So, cash is all about deceit?
In some respects, I think we’re getting the cart before the horse.
Implementing a cashless society while ‘hoping’ that a Labour government (if and when they get elected) will solve (or even address) the problem of inclusion is what has some people very worried. That’s the obstacle here.
Surely the problem of inclusion should be solved and implemented BEFORE we do away with cash altogether?
Access to cash is vital to many frightened people for many different reasons—as some of these comments have illustrated. What these folks fear right now is that cash is suddenly becoming more and more difficult to obtain and use, while nobody in power is doing anything to address the issues they have with accessibility to other forms of monetary exchange. Get that order reversed, and there might be a change of attitude.
No system is without flaw, including this cashless lark …for example, if you lose your card or get it stolen, you are unlikely to have another one stashed away in an envelope at home. You’re cut off from your own money until the card issue gets sorted, which can take more than just a couple of days (at the moment.) But if there is a will, there is a way, so I’m not saying forget cashless. Instead, solve the known problems that going cashless is going to cause. Get that ‘way’ firmly established before cutting people off from the system they have relied upon all their lives, up to now.
There is a bit too much of the ‘it will be all right on the night’ attitude towards many technological changes that are being thrown at us …almost too fast to keep up. It’s one thing to be unable to foresee problems that will crop up; it’s another thing to foresee the problems but just shrug them off and carry on.
Can I just make clear that no one is suggesting abolishing cash, me included?
I ask saying people are abandoning it, which is quite different. And we won’t stop that. Most people want nothing to do with it, so it will fade away.
And I agree with you in inclusion – that is vital.
My specialism is confiscating the proceeds of crime. Stored cash, especially in high denominations, facilitates crime, clandestine government activity, and tax evasion. Could you call for frequent design changes of high value denominations? Especially US notes, all of which are still legal tender. I think this would be a good deed for the day, if not our era.
I do agree that cash facilitates hiding transctions – be that from your partner or from the authorities.
But it leaves us dependent, to a degree I think is almost reckless, on the continuity of (a) electricity supply (b) internet connectivity (c) banking platforms – most of which are rickety at best (cf when TSB platform fell over).
But that is true of just about everything else as well.
True. That just means the problem of increasing dependency on highly complex and inherently fragile systems is bigger that just money.
Living in Sweden for almost six years I haven’t used cash for the last five. It’s an irrelevance here. Even small children have cards. Or swish, a telephone app. Which you can use with a qr code or your phone number linked to your banking account. But it was difficult at first because you couldn’t get Swish without a bank account and you couldn’t get an account without being on the state’s tax register. That took us six months – for various reasons – not unusual but not typical. Fortunately we got a basic account with debit card quite quickly, because we had substantial funds in English accounts.
It will come to be seen as anachronistic to use cash, but one thing I find frustrating is keeping accounts – every purchase goes through the bank and I like to check it off the statement each month. Small things like a coffee all generate an entry whereas once you just drew cash for a week and it was one entry. I suppose it depends how careful you are but I like to check. So we still have a lot of paper receipts to handle.
From a privacy point of view, every transaction being recorded also takes away from surprises when you have joint accounts!!
Agree with you on cash. Total pain nowadays especially as card machine costs and fees have gone down a lot.
On digital exclusion our local council is doing an excellent work on digital poverty. Supplying refurb laptops, internet access, even smartphones and training to the digitally excluded. It’s not means tested just referrals from 3rd sector professionals etc.
All of the refugees, I’m teaching English to, who didn’t have a laptop have been given one if they wanted.
Brilliant
The local authority one of my sons now works for is making this a big priority, I gather
Today’s coins and notes will eventually be in museums
From time before memory, money has always been the invention of the rich and powerful and they have always found ways to impose it upon ordinary people. It has always facilitated the repayment of their debts and recordkeeping has always been an essential feature of money in whatever form it has taken. All legitimised forms of money have always been regulated by governments.
In the modern era, as power has swung away from the old elites to the new ones with huge resource to harness data to their own ends, so the ‘manufacture’ of money has become entirely digitised with cash as a very small side stream used only by ordinary people and crooks.
Governments and legislators are struggling to keep track of the development of digitised data-based money and the essential record keeping. Blockchain, with its superior ability to perform recordkeeping, will eventually become the key technology within the financial systems of all countries.
As has been noted elsewhere, data depends entirely upon the provision of electrical power and the prevention of cybercrime and so is vulnerable to any disruption.
As advances take us to places we cannot yet foresee, these technological problems will need to be overcome by data-based elites and their businesses, financial institutions, banks , governments and regulators to ensure the stability and security of these data-based money systems.
It is just a matter of time.
I disagree on blockchain
I am troubled by your response to this – I picked up your irritation early on and can understand it.
A little bit of taking stock taking might help.
Firstly, I think that we can agree that people get emotional about money? Either because they have too little, or not enough or just want more. Emotion dominates money from rich to poor.
Secondly, there are concerns with who is in charge of the money supply and which money creation narrative dominates with many permutations creating fear and uncertainty (again, emotion in play – and in the midst Richard of a deliberate under supply of money – austerity and CoLC, interest rates alone will push people to favour ‘harder’ forms of cash). Not to mention the real concerns people have with the state of our democracy that owns our currency.
So thirdly there is this odd relationship we have with money and its tangibility and intangibility, starting with coin, then to bank notes and now progressing into plastic cards that move money around so fast and over great distances. All I’m saying here is that there is something cultural going on here – a change of culture almost imperceptible at the time because simply of the pace of life and change. But there is a cultural retention of hard cash amongst some and I think that that is to be expected. It is very human Richard. That £10 note in my wallet produced by the BoE is MY £10 if you see what I mean and it gives me agency and immediacy. It’s a tangible part of my wages/bank account balance that is just a number (and one that changes).
Fourthly, there is yourself as an accountant, researcher, campaigner who it could be said is well ahead of the curve so to speak.
Your attitude to technology is consistently positive because you see how electronic transfer etc., perhaps can leave a record of how money moves around. It makes an accountant’s job a lot easier for sure tracking this than trying to track cash in hand.
For you, this technology is genuinely useful and powerful in solving problems as much as it is at helping bad actors create them. And it is also useful at finding people out I imagine in ways that I and others here as non accountants can only imagine.
You might even have been able to base your international tax work on the basis that computers can generate ledgers quickly and comprehensively in exchanging details about electronic money, as much as it has speeded up the financial sector’ s criminal behaviour. You seem to have always seen both sides of the same coin.
So, if that is close to the truth, don’t underestimate (perhaps) your understanding of the future – which seems to be already here.
Your career has been accountancy it seems and unlike many you’ve seen things that might just be plain wrong and you’ve admirably sought to address those. Money is a very technical area as well as an emotional one- tax as a subject alone is one that I find extremely difficult and I respond here clenching my glutes at the risk of coming across as ignorant.
The best thing to do is appreciate the non-accountancy perspectives I think. We can only look at things from where we are.
Just keep ploughing on Richard and we’ll catch up. I’m sure you’ve been here before. I wish I could say it will get easier, but you must have known that this is not necessarily the case. And you always refine and develop your arguments going forward don’t you? So keep going forward.
Thanks PSR
Appreciated
I’m sure you’re right about the move towards cashless money, but my word look at the response!
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t relish that particular future. Your boys, you’ve said so recently, don’t have much truck with cash and I’m sure the same applies to many of the younger generations who are at home with computer technology particularly the convenience of life through smartphones, but that isn’t me. My son in law waves his watch at bar staff to pay for drinks !!!! Yes. I’m a technophobe. Literally I FEAR it. It’s not that I just don’t like it, I actually feel ……… emasculated by it because I can’t quite get my head round it. I had cards 50(?) years ago and appreciate the convenience of them, use them on a regular basis now, but I also use cash and I’m sure I’d miss it because it feels ‘real’. I feel for those people who are even less tech-savvy than me and who, as someone above refers to as putting cash into separate piles to deal with separate bills, rely on the tangibility of cash to keep their accounts in order. (I was very definitely there for a while)
Still, it will keep progressing and future generations will regard the idea of carrying hard cash as risible. But not before I’m dead I hope. When people want to stop using cash it will disappear I’m sure and I guess you are quite right in saying the trend is in that direction.
It won’t stop fraud though: only change the methods. 🙂
My view, for what it’s worth, is that cash is now completely pointless.
I know there are fears about the ease with which digital money can be stolen (NFC wossnames in tube stations and the like…), but I have never experienced it and don’t know anyone who has, and I know quite a few people. Also… has everyone forgotten that it’s incredibly easy to steal cash too? If a burglar breaks into my home, they aren’t going to find a single penny. If you keep your cash in envelopes in drawers as one contributor suggested, that’s the whole lot gone. So, cash isn’t risk free, it’s just that the risks are different.
Cashless is easier (I just need one card, rather than mucking about with notes and coins), I believe it to be more secure (I’ve never been digitally robbed. I have however lost the odd £20 note through carelessness and had cash stolen in the past) and it’s more efficient to the majority of users.
Each to their own, I suppose, but cash is a burden I’m glad to be rid of. There are risks with both systems, but there are risks with everything. It might take some time for acceptance to bed in, but cash is (IMHO quite rightly) a dead man walking,
I think you are missing some of the major advantages to business that cash presents:
– No income tax
– No VAT
– No money back
– No guarantee
I say this in jest, but in reality avoiding paying PAYE income tax and employers national insurance is probably the major motivation to most cash businesses. It makes employment significantly cheaper and possibly means higher earnings for the employees making them unlikely to turn in their employer for tax evasion.
I saw a lot of stalls at Glastonbury this year saying “cash is king” and one very rudely saying how much they hated card payments and paying bank fees, and how they were “sticking it to the man.” But I kept telling my family this was disingenuous – banks charge businesses for depositing cash too, and it’s often more expensive than card fees. If they aren’t getting charged, it’s because that cash is going nowhere near a bank, and straight into their employee’s pockets.
When I had a business employing mainly part-time women who had school age children so couldn’t have full time jobs, I paid more than the shop workers pay and I made sure they all worked enough hours to pay NI but not to pay tax, which is what they wanted. I don’t know what it is like now, but women’s state pensions were a lot lower because they often did not pay NI for years. I thought that needed remedying.
This was in late 80s, early 90s so only took cash. As I took cash, I paid in cash.
Does that make me someone who cheated the taxman?
No
But some who take cash do
Of course it is not true that all do
Why imply something I did not say?
Sorry, Richard, I was replying to Chris Gilbert, who seemed to imply that.
OK
One problem with moderating is I do not see the threads people comment on
That is a WordPress weakness – and that is the software that drives this blog
“In the late 80s and early 90s”
Makes sense 30 years ago – I am talking about 2023 though, where any business with employees has to report PAYE to HMRC regularly, or at least keep records (and that’s assuming all their employees are paid less than £123 a week).
Would you suggest my plasterer who asked to be paid in cash for a £500 job was declaring it all to HMRC? The builder who offered me a discount for cash is doing it for convenience? Perhaps I could buy some magic beans with the savings I would get!
I am glad that you are honest; but let’s not naively pretend that everyone else must be too. In 2023 paying people in cash is inconvenient and difficult – as such, companies that still do it often aren’t doing it for honourable reasons. Can I say for certain that they aren’t following the rules? No, just seems extremely likely.
It was interesting hearing about the debt crisis in Greece a few years ago how many problems they had there with tax evasion. It had been casual and commonplace, and I’ve found in this country there’s plenty of people who have no moral scruples about avoiding tax. Obviously you are not one of them though Jen!
So when you pay cash to your builder, do you not ask for a receipt? Particularly when paying large amounts of money.
If someone does not give you paperwork, don’t use them. It’s that simple.
I like to think that there are more honest business owners than dishonest.
I agree
But I am the sort of person who argues up my bill on in a restaurant or cafe if they’ve missed something off
My local rugby where I am involved with fundraising has now bought a card readers to take money at events – the system is in its second year of use and is doing very well. For fund raising events!!
However………I remember working in retail when there was a big push on getting people to use debit cards in the 1990’s. The Big chains all went for the system and then were hit for huge increases by the banks for using the new technology which went down like a shit sandwich at the time.
So cash will die I think but the abuse of the cashless systems might be something we have to live with and react to or even better – cut off.
I recently donated £5 to a church I had visited, and enjoyed. They left a QR code and as I had no cash I used it. The whole thing worked remarkably well. But if the congregation was big the collection hymn might need a good number of verses….
I suspect 10 would have been a good turnout though