HMRC is in hot water yet again; this time over data showing that over 9 million National Insurance contributions dating back as far as 2004 – 05 have not been added to employees’ records.

If it wasn’t so tragic. Mark Hall, who is Deputy Chief Information Officer at HMRC, has been praising the performance of their Aspire programme, which is the outsourcing deal between HMRC and Cap Gemini brought in to replace its tragically inept EDS precursor.

HMRC has been issuing a large number of incorrect VAT penalties over the last year and a half, according to UHY Hacker Young. In fact over 50% of the penalties that were issued to taxpayers were later overturned on appeal

A fair proportion of UK workers are not happy, according to the latest research from Badenoch & Clark.

Small businesses operating in the UK are finding the tax system insufferably complex, according to the Chartered Institute of Taxation.

440 jobs are to be lost at Official Receiver offices throughout the UK, according to the Public and Commercial Services Union.

Following on from last week’s musings on middle management and their approach to hiring people, I’ve been following a conversation in another place about how to go about outsourcing and/or building shared service centres.

The class of 2011 might be interested to learn that accountancy firms currently top the list of graduate recruiters, according to High Fliers Research, a market research company.

Freelancers should take note that HMRC is stressing the importance of filing online tax returns by the deadline date of the 31st January. Failure to comply with this will result in a penalty of £100.

Project Merlin, the project launched last year to secure consensus amongst the leading UK banks regarding financial issues including lending to small businesses and bonuses, is likely to lose the support of Spanish banking giant Santander.

From a cost perspective, it’s definitely becoming easier for online accountants to start up their own business.

We keep hearing about the skills shortage in IT in this country. A lot of the justification for work being outsourced and offshored, for example, is justified on the grounds that the clients can’t find the people they need in the UK, so simply have to go elsewhere for them.