Nice Mrs Stopforth

I don’t think anyone likes dealing with (or paying) the taxman but because my place of employment and country of residence have been different, I’ve been dealing with them constantly for several years. Luckily at the start, BT provided some fancy accountants who did all the work for me but they soon dumped me when my ‘assignment’ to France (and their fees) ended and so I was on my own.

Initially, my tax was dealt with by a huge Inland Revenue office just outside Glasgow and so there was some sort of affinity given the accents involved but when I left BT my tax affairs moved to Cardiff or Wrexham or somewhere in Wales.

Of course, you never get to speak to the same person twice in these large offices and as my tax is quite complicated, I found myself explaining my situation over and over again. And then they let it slip that they’d lost my file in the transfer from Glasgow to Wales hence why I had to explain everything fifteen times!

And then I was moved again, this time to Liverpool where they have a special ‘ex-pats’ unit and are masters at screwing every last penny out of those of us who have left the UK, normally for sunnier climes.

So my explanations began again. I didn’t let on that they’d lost my file as I reckoned this was to my advantage but the downside was that they sent me a lather large tax bill, just when I was expecting a rather large rebate and so the discussions began. The good thing though, was that I had my own lady – a nice scouse tax lady (Mrs Stopforth) who I was able to call on her own extension – I still had to explain things several times but only because my tax was very complicated. But she was really nice and we got on just fine. I’m not at the stage of asking her about her family yet but we’re heading in that direction!

The tax discussions have been going on for about a year and a half now and eventually I resigned myself to paying the UK Government another wodge of my redundancy money on the basis that I either paid it to the UK or France – it didn’t bother me as long as I only paid it once!

And so we had another call last week but this time Mrs Stopforth wasn’t available. The lady who answered the call at one stage put the handset on the desk (instead of putting me on hold) and so I heard all that was going on in the background. I heard things like, ‘ooh – we must’ve lost his last letter’, and ‘he’s from France – says he’s been discussing this for 18 months’ and ‘ he’s an ex-pat – we’ll tell him to write another letter or fax it to us’, and then I heard a familiar voice in the background. ‘Oh – is that that nice Mr Cupples from France? We always have a nice chat – he’s such a lovely chap. Tell him I’ll get back to him’.

5 minutes later the phone went and it was that nice Mrs Stopforth apologizing for the inconvenience. She had my letter and not to worry about a thing – she’d sort it all out and she’d fix it for next year as well.

Result!