I phoned the Inland Revenue again yesterday and got straight through to a very helpful, no-nonsense Scottish woman, who asked what number error I had, and immediately told me what to do to correct it. It was just a tiny bug in the online tax return submitting software, which was rounding figures up to whole numbers in every other box, but for some reason not in the ‘Other Capital Allowaces’ field. And, instead of rounding them up myself, I was rather lazily entering the exact figures since all the other boxes were rounding them up for me automatically.

Aren’t you thrilled to know the answer to this mysterious problem? Thought not. But, you know, I couldn’t leave it hanging there with no closure, could I?

Today I finished turning a messy pile of receipts and a half-filled-in spreadsheet into a Tax Return, which I submitted online, as I have for the past four years. Actually I should say ‘attempted to submit online’. It didn’t work. It gave me a fairly incomprehensible error, insisting that various boxes ought to add up to something formulaic which I would’ve thought was programmed into the submitting software itself. In the error, the boxes had names. On the form, they didn’t. So I don’t even know which boxes they were supposed to be. And I’m sure I hadn’t done it wrong. I did exactly the same as last year, and the year before, when it all worked fine.

Anyway, after two more tries it still wasn’t working, so I did what the error page suggested I do if the problem recurred, and phoned the online help desk. I was put on hold for a while, and a helpful recorded message suggested that I email the help desk instead, if I didn’t want to be in the queue.

So I emailed the helpdesk and explained the problem.

An hour or so later I got an email back telling me to phone the help desk.

Have a feeling that the Inland Revenue are just procrastinating.

“The date which your accounts are made up to must be on or after 01-01-1851″ says the online tax return thingy when I accidentally put ‘08′ instead of ‘2008′.

I probably found this overly amusing for what it is. I also probably shouldn’t be drinking whisky as I file my tax return.

My accounts are horrible.
I have an enormous pile of unordered receipts, some of which have been noted in an Excel spreadsheet, and some of which haven’t. So I have to go through all of them anyway, and thus should not have bothered writing down the ones that I did write down. Grah. Going to go and eat some pickled onions instead.

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Update: I have just found coriander seeds in my expenses. Not just a receipt for coriander seeds; an actual packet of coriander seeds. This may give you an idea of how bad it is.