Tax shackles
I’ve just received a notice of my next year’s tax coding (next UK tax year starts on April 6th). HMRC are famously messing up on many of these, but in my case I thought it could just carry through from last year – too simple to mess up.
Tax code D0. Huh? What’s that? It’s a penalty rate! Bugrthat!!!
In smaller print, I see it refers to my income from WebThing. Well, my income from WebThing over the past two years (since joining Sun) has been a whopping £0.00, so I guess I can cope with paying a high percentage in tax 😉 But it does mean that if WebThing were to start paying me again, the government would take 66 pence for every £1 salary, from the very first pound. Ouch!
No mention of what tax code they’ve told Sun and/or Oracle, so there’s hope they’ve got that right. Guess it means I’m tied to Oracle with shackles of red tape, no matter what happens.
I should try to haggle a reduction, on the grounds of paying money into tax-exempt things! Paying by the rules and claiming a rebate when they’re bankrupt is getting ever more scary!
niq's soapbox 
The penalty rate sounds plausible, yeah. After all, the exchequer has got to get a shedload of money from somewhere, and there’s only so much you can find by rummaging around the back of the sofa.
So… who won’t squeal too loudly? Ah yes, companies that aren’t actually doing any business! There’s thousands of them out there, some of them are bound to make some money, if only by accident, and their owners probably won’t bother to implement tax-avoidance measures for the sake of a tenner here or there.