Fingers crossed

Tax, seems the inland Revenue have made a bit of a blunder and both undercharged and overcharged the taxpayers of the land in their ever voracious grasping into our wallets and purses.
Seems some people could owe £1500 whilst other could be owed £418. I must admit I hope I'm in that group, or the group who owe and are owed nothing at all.

BBC.

Nearly six million people in the UK have paid the wrong amount of tax.

About £2bn was underpaid via the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) system in the past two years, with about 1.4 million people owing an average of £1,500 each.
But £1.8bn has also been overpaid and some 4.3 million people will get a rebate because they have paid too much.
Treasury minister David Gauke said that in the current financial climate, the government was not in a position to "just wave goodbye" to the money owed.
He said the government had inherited the problem and the PAYE system - which was created in the 1940s - was struggling to cope with modern working patterns.

A new computer system introduced by HMRC in 2009 has allowed more discrepancies to be identified.

As a result millions of letters will be sent to taxpayers across the UK informing them of errors in their contributions.
The first 45,000 are expected to arrive on Tuesday, with 30,000 informing recipients they are due a rebate of on average £418.
The remaining 15,000 letters will tell taxpayers they have underpaid and will have their tax code altered next year to recoup the money.

Times are hard for many folk at the moment and the last thing they need is an unexpected tax bill, particularly when it isn't their fault but that of their employer or HMRC.
Perhaps if people were more responsible for their own tax there would be fewer mistakes, then again PAYE makes it easy, although it puts the onus on employers rather than the people to pay their tax. Someone once posited abolishing PAYE and everyone gets a tax (local and national) bill on the 5th of April, Elections are then held the week after, they reckoned it would reduce bills and eliminate waste as councillors and politicians would move heaven and earth to be re-elected including providing true value for money.

It's worth a thought anyway.