salimma's Journal: Tax assessment nightmares

If you live in the UK you would have recently seen infomercial ads night after night from the Internal Revenue about filling in your self-assessed tax forms.

Thankfully my period of internship employment falls in the current tax year, so I do not have to sort out the paperwork for another few months, but it brought back to mind a jarring point:

Everyone gets the first £5000 or so tax free, so for people like me whose tax get deducted automatically from my paycheck, how hard is it to only start deducting when I get over the limit?

One would think that would save them a lot of paperwork. But bureaucracies... heard GW Bush's exemption of dividend tax is already full of complicating exceptions. And that's from a small government, let's simplify tax collection President!

One must truly wonder whether the civil service chooses its newcomers to perpetuate its incompetences and thus maintain their bloated presence...