HMRC has hired an army of almost 500 new valuation agents to snoop on homes. At your door…
The Valuation Office Agency’s annual report up to the end of March showed that staff costs had risen by £31.5 million and the total Full Time Equivalent staff number has risen by 493, a ten-times increase in the hiring rate on the year before. The agency is being merged with HMRC. It said:
“The rise in staff costs is primarily due to our pay award, and an increase in agency staff costs of approximately £12 million to support performance recovery and data enhancement work to improve our Council Tax data quality.”
The agents will be able to demand entry to homes for “internal inspections” to determine whether they are worth over £2 million and will therefore have to pay Reeves’ so-called Mansion Tax. If you don’t let them in you will get a £200 fine or worse. It’s soon to be a bungalow tax thanks to fiscal drag…
Back in February the VOA told Guido’s FOI Unit that it was “not recruiting an additional 1,000 valuation officials to support the High Value Council Tax Surcharge. It is not yet possible to confirm the precise number of VOA staff that will be allocated to HVCTS activity, however it will be a minority of the 1,000 additional headcount due to be recruited to HMRC as a whole.” Seeing as more valuation officers will have been recruited since March, Guido highly doubts that the above quote is the truth…
Under current legislation HMRC can ask the occupier to agree a time for an inspection but if the they refuse to agree, the taxman has to apply to the First-tier Tribunal for approval. This could get messy…
The Tories are campaigning against the snooping. Shadow housing minister David Simmonds said:
“Labour are recruiting an army of council tax police to enter your home and drag you into paying their new family homes tax. This is a sinister attack on civil liberties and another example of worrying overreach from this Labour Government.”
It’s the hated Hearth Tax all over again…
Lord Khan in the Telegraph: “I hope, and I say this in a non-pompous way, that the public service I do will bring rewards in this world and the hereafter,” he says. “I’m hoping the work I do is earning me Brownie points.”