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I’m sceptical about this
Case in point: HMRC. On the one hand, given that tax for the large majority of us is formulaic I can see where automation (is it really AI ?) should be able to handle almost all the work. Maybe it already is doing ? I submit my annual tax return online and get a calculation in real time and that seems to work well. I occasionally talk to someone on the phone and they seem to have all the information they need at hand and are expert enough to deal with my queries. So far so good.
But I can’t e-mail them. Yes, you heard that right. If I need something (other than the return) put in writing between HMRC and me then whichever of us is doing the putting actually has to generate a physical paper document, fold it up, stick it into an envelope, in my case stick a stamp on and then let Royal Mail transfer it to the other one.
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HMRC would only have to print the email for their case file anyway so they save money by making you do it
Nope in typical govt style they outsource it to a company called restore who in turn subcontract DX and Iron mountain etc.
Letters get scanned and emailed through to their Avaya contact centre which then puts them into digital call queues for them to ignore.
HMRC - if there was ever an award for the agency that could take something simple and complicate it to the point of uselessness they would win every year.
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As I understand it the documents do ‘become electronic’, as of course they have to.
The postcode for PAYE and Self Assessment is BX9 1AS and BX doesn’t correspond to a geographical place. Royal Mail divert the stuff to whichever mail handling office (I’m imagining grey buildings on industrial estates) has capacity. It’s opened there, scanned in and then directed to the bit of the organisation it’s meant for.
I once phoned up shortly after mailing something, to check it had arrived before a deadline, and was told that as long as it had been mailed on time I would be OK. But they couldn’t absolutely confirm it because “it won’t have been scanned in yet”.
EDIT: As Chris has confirmed.
I imagine they don’t allow e-mail because the ‘effort threshold’ of physical mail stops people pestering them continuously when they’re busy. And maybe they’re nervous about becoming dependent on a publicly-connected IT system, any of which is vulnerable to the supplier breaking it with a routine update and/or to foreign governments breaking it to cause trouble. Then again, the tax return IT does seem to work.
Example of typical HMRC fuckery, so I file my self assessment return online in November
It’s £1000, I pay PAYE as a permy employee and submitted in Nov so before 30/12…all good 
and then pretty much every other day since then…
CUNTS!!! 
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My experience with HMRC is that they are basically understaffed and build in their own delays. So they write to you with a question and give you six weeks to reply. Even if you reply by return they don’t look at it for six weeks
I phoned them last Thursday, 9th, IIRC with a small query and there was some confusion about the latest document that they’d mailed to me. (I was holding one dated Dec 13th with an anomaly in it, the HMRC lady could see one dated Dec 16th which didn’t seem to have the anomaly.) She said she’d send a copy of the Dec 16th one to me. It fell through my letterbox yesterday, Monday 13th. I thought that was pretty good, given my less-than-stellar RM delivery Office.
I had to complete a W-8BEN US tax form recently. Only took me a day to look up and work out what the one side, 9 question form was about. Language almost indecipherable.
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Somewhere Chris Morris is kicking himself that he didn’t come up with this headline.
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Slight shock for Lancashire residents
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when EDF say “no cause for concern” I’d be popping a few KI tablets and jumping in the car to drive away very fast.
Missed that one, would have been a sight to see and hear. They lost the grid load, this would have closed the throttle/ steam stop valve to prevent turbine overspeed in the unloaded state. The steam releif valve opens to dump steam at 160 bar/550 C to atmosphere. That’s one loud bang!
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Oh that Stronzi . . .
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It’s a bugger when you can’t find things isn’t it ?
Seriously, ISTR that the Dounreay breeder had trouble with this quite often, given the rather long thin wire south out of the site. Didn’t they have some sort of dummy load that automatically kicked in ? A whole array of metal plates in the seawater, or some such. I imagine you could boil the sea quite quickly with a thing like that.
I straight-up like that - sofa-moshed hard…
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No amount of money will give any one the talent to play it like Jeff Beck
It was probably bought by Johnny Depp 
