WRITTEN ON June 25th, 2007 BY Shane McCracken AND STORED IN What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

There’s s discrepancy between how much HMRC think we paid in PAYE and how much our records show we paid. To help sort it out the Accounts Office very helpfully printed out some records of our “account”. Well they printed out some of their screens with 13 transactions per page and then made some annotations by hand to explain a few things that aren’t apparent from the computer records. Unsurprisingly there were a few other things unexplained such as RIR, INC, O/D, 228 in the TYPE of transactions column. Big kudos to anyone who can guess what those acronyms actually stand for. HMRC employees are welcome to guess – the lovely lady I spoke had to look them up too.

I commiserated with her about having to work on such a difficult system and joked that she probably had to work on a terminal with green text (a bit like this one).

To my amazement she answered, “Yes, it is green. It’s from the 80’s”.

WIBBI, if the HMRC held their records in some form that was understandable to their “customers” and to their staff.