Sir Humphrey’s new charter?

Copied with due credit from an anonymous posting on AccountingWeb

We will:

• Treat you as dishonest, believing you are willing to pay whatever we dream up, stop you from appealing or reducing your bill, unless you are an MP.
• Respect you to the same standard we treat our staff. We aim to treat everyone the same, but some better than others.
• Provide you with inaccurate information, creating extra stress, work and costs for you and our staff, hoping to make it hard for everyone who tries to get things right.
• Recognise your right to be represented by someone else, then undermine them as a route to increasing costs and stress on you and thereby destroying your will to resist.
• Pursue relentlessly those that break or bend the rules, then promote them.
• Lose the information that we hold about you. Expediency and plausible deniability are cornerstones of our Data Protection policy.

What we expect of you:

• Trust us, we are from the government and are here to help you. You need our help because you don’t know what is good for you.
• Give us all your money, even if you don’t have any left. You may think that impossible, but as always you’re wrong and we’re always right. Alastair Darling is printing money and giving it away to the banks so that they can lend it to you, at high rates, in order that you can pay us the money you don’t have.
• Tell us if you are going bankrupt, as always we have a leaflet that will help you, we may wish to do it to you before anyone else.
• Work with us to ensure your payments are lost within our Super Highend Information Technology systems that you will be paying for in years to come.
• Respect our staff, irrespective of whether some are dishonest and reprehensible characters like so many of their incompetent superiors.
• Contact us when you need help, advice or support, letting us know if you have particular needs so that we may ensure your risk assessment is corrected, allowing us to ensure that you receive the appropriate treatment.