MEMBER TAKEOVER
What’s 22 years between friends?
Don Macarthur MA PhD FCIPP, Payroll Assurance Scheme (PAS) assessor and former HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) official discusses how his relationship with payroll began, and looks back on 22 years of fond memories with the CIPP
I t was in the spring of 2000 that I first encountered the Institute of Pensions and Payroll Management (IPPM), the organisation that we now know and love as the CIPP. I was a senior civil servant in the Inland Revenue, the organisation that we now know as HMRC. 22 years later, it’s a real pleasure to be invited to reflect on what’s gone on since and to celebrate some wonderful memories. But I trust readers will forgive me if I jettison the old names from now on, and in the rest of this article refer to the CIPP and HMRC under their current names – or initalisms for us more pedantic folk. My HMRC career By the year 2000, I’d had a successful and enjoyable HMRC career. This included a wide variety of roles, including: ● local and regional management ● taxation of the self-employed and limited companies ● taxation of North Sea oil companies. I’d also played leading roles in some big changes, such as: ● the creation of the large business office ● the introduction of closer working with value added tax and excise operations ● the introduction of computerisation to petroleum revenue tax or PRT. It still scares me to recall that I had to calculate my first PRT assessment on my own, entirely manually, only to discover the tax I assessed, which was a shade under a billion pounds, was probably the biggest sum ever assessed at the time. (In case
you’re worried, nobody challenged my calculations at all!) My first encounters with payroll But I had no idea that I was about to embark on the most enjoyable and satisfying nine or ten years of my career – managing the relationship between HMRC and the nation’s two million employers, a role which had never existed before, which I had to create from scratch. At the time, I was unfamiliar with the complexities of pay as you earn (PAYE) and even less aware of the list of tasks the nation’s employers were expected to perform alongside the basic PAYE functions. These were tasks like processing statutory payments and student loan recovery, and the soon to be introduced payment of tax credits by employers (the modern equivalent is Universal Credit, which is paid by the Department for Work and Pensions). I soon realised I needed to build a range of new relationships both within HMRC and across the employer community, to help me understand what was going on and start planning how I could make a difference. Thankfully, it was in my first couple of weeks that an HMRC colleague took me along to a CIPP event (in the Barbican in London if I remember rightly) and so began my relationship with payroll. This was a relationship which quickly brought me many constructive and practical ideas to help in my core challenge of improving the interaction between employers and HMRC.
One of my guiding principles throughout my career has been to delay rushing to judgment, while I stop and discover how the world looks from the other end of the telescope. I soon found that the CIPP was an excellent place to help me do just that. I was invited to visit payroll offices around the country and observe exactly how frustrating it could be to follow some of the ever-changing requirements of the PAYE regime, an invaluable experience which sadly cannot be easily replicated in today’s security conscious times. I was invited to visit payroll offices around the country and observe exactly how frustrating it could be to follow some of the ever-changing requirements of the pay as you earn regime In the CIPP, I found a community of people who were determined to comply with whatever HMRC threw at them and equally determined to learn and improve their processes. Above all, I found a community who were focussed first and foremost on getting things right for their
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | December 2022 – January 2023 | Issue 86 34
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