My spouse did business at a collector show in Illinois years ago. We filed some sales tax thing, as we collected sales tax (as we were told to do) and remitted it. Did that for... 2 years, IIRC, then didn't do that show again. We got letters threatening that we would be penalized if we didn't fill out the form and remit our collected tax. There was no option to say 'nothing'. I mean... we did one year - put 0. Then we stopped the business. Had multiple emails, physical letters, and hours on the phone being bounced around between places to say "we don't run the business any more - we're not operating". And... no one seemed to have a way to decidedly stop these. We'd get "OK" then... 6 months later got a letter saying "you owe $x and penalties for failing to file"... I was slightly concerned about driving through Illinois at some point, thinking they might have an arrest warrant out for one of us. It took 2 years of not getting these to finally believe we're not in their system any more. Similar story for New Jersey, but it wasn't quite as bad. Still required a lot of manual work.
In South Africa we have a TV license which any shop selling TV’s is required by law to report the buyer’s TV license number for any purchase.
The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.
However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.
Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.
Huh, in my state the secretary of state is where you register a business, and you just go to the website and click "this is no longer operating" and then they stop sending you letters to file your 0 taxes.
I was going to comment "dog license???" but I looked it up for my county and I had no idea this was a thing. I'm in awe. I adopted an adult dog ~9 years ago. He has issued literally one single bark in that span. He stays indoors or in my fenced-in yard 100% of the time because of some health issues. I'm supposed to pay an annual fee for this or they'll fine me?? Nobody ever told me this, not the shelter, not the vet he goes to regularly who presumably has the ability to check this.
There are also apparently canvassers paid by the county who go door to door checking for this?! I'm not the kind of person to typically nitpick about where my taxes are going, but...I retroactively and broadly apologize for every lighthearted jab I may have ever made about TV licensing in the UK. This is beyond dumb in comparison. And my condolences, the fact that this system leads to them harassing you in this way is completely insane.
Illinois online forms are egregiously bad. A couple examples off the top of my head:
I was traveling through the state and got on a toll road by accident without cash to pay the tolls, the toll booth employee said I could just pay online, pointing to a sign that said "missed a toll? pay online at <url>", so we continued our trip intending to pay the tolls online. At the end of the trip, I logged on to pay our tolls--the application insisted that we enter the specific toll IDs of each toll that we missed, even though we didn't know we were supposed to be recording any toll IDs. If you didn't know the toll IDs, you could use a map application to look up the toll IDs, but the map application would crash within a second of opening it and even if you managed to get a screenshot the resolution was so low that the text was indecipherable. When I called the support number, they told me that I would be fined triple the cost of the tolls if I didn't pay within a week, but I would be able to pay without knowing the specific toll IDs that I missed. When I asked the agent to tell me what tolls I missed (clearly they knew if they were going to fine me), they told me they couldn't tell me for another week. I pointed out that this would be after the toll deadline and they relentlessly tried to avoid acknowledging that simple fact. Eventually I sent them my best guess about what I owed with a letter stating what I had attempted and that I would contact a lawyer about any fines and never heard from them again.
Some years later, after moving to Chicago, I had to file state taxes for the first time. The state issued me a driver's license with a 12 digit number, but the state tax form only allowed me to authenticate with an 8 digit Illinois driver's license number (the other acceptable forms of identification didn't apply to me for reasons I no longer remember).
I feel like half of these are quickly resolved in court when you explain what happened and the judge calls the state a bunch of fucking morons and dismisses the case. But the other half of the time the judge won't use common sense. Also the state is relying on you not wanting to show up in front of a judge out of your own state to contest what I presume is a relatively small amount of dollars.
Illinois is one of the most administratively fucked up and corrupt states in the country. Four of the last ten governors have been so bad they actually served prison time and the current governor appears to be cut from the same cloth.
Why would they ever fix the system. Some number of people will just pay it and those people are pure profit. Heck, fixing the system costs money.
It's the same evil math behind every other billing scam that sails under the flag of ignorance.
Speaking of ignorance, to all those people saying you forgot to fill out a form, there are several states that are known to be maliciously sloppy about this sort of thing. You file a form and they silently reject it or billing you anyway on some questionable pretext because they can. NY is one of them. Doesn't surprise me that IL is too since both states are kinda cash strapped.
>Why would they ever fix the system. Some number of people will just pay it and those people are pure profit. Heck, fixing the system costs money.
The system is run by employees of whatever agency handles taxes. Neither the employees nor the agency keep a portion of the taxes. If they do not have the money or will to fix it, people are supposed to pressure their representatives to give them the money and mandate.
If this truly came down to an intent to squeeze more money out of people than they owed, that would almost always come from the law's wording. Again, pressure the representatives.
The only times an agency would squeeze money is when it's funded in large part by fines or fees, or if an employee is committing fraud and pocketing some of the money.
You can't just start collecting sales tax before registering with the state, and likewise to stop collecting you need to deregister. It is a fairly standard procedures every accountant is aware of.
If you are on a framework, that gives prospective public sector buyers assurance that certain basic checks/ due-dilligence about your business has already been done.
So even if you have not made a sale to a public sector entity in recent times but are on a framework then makes sense to keep your details up-to-date...
I work in UK Government and the problem is that procurement depts are so afraid of awarding tenders to dodgy suppliers they add so many layers of bureaucracy that it prevents local or more innovative contractors. The rules are much more flexible for low value tenders <£30k but it is a very exclusionary system.
Please realise there are many civil servants and local government officers that realise the system is overly bureaucratic and are encouraging procurement teams to change their processes, but it is mostly dictated by national legislation.
I think allowing mayoral authorities to flex their procurement systems for innovative solutions would be a good testing ground. The whole point of devolution is to allow areas to spend money locally how they see fit and it can become a bit of a laboratory for new, risky ideas that - if they pay off - can be copied by other places.
> procurement depts are so afraid of awarding tenders to dodgy suppliers they add so many layers of bureaucracy that it prevents local or more innovative contractors
a/k/a regulatory capture. Large established vendors can afford the staffing to deal with this, small startups either cannot or they miss an obscure step in the process and they are excluded.
I don't think it will change even with devolution. Given enough time it will certainly be back to where they were.
Every single time they replace an old system with something else they all manage to add additional complicity. Don't know if you get to use HERA in your department but it is a complete pile of mess.
Their medium value purchase system is a waste of time too - I work for a small business that does government contracts and you have to pay the government just for the pleasure of bidding for contracts.
Then every bid has it's own unique weird things, where often you are told who you are bidding against and sometimes even how much the government wants to pay!
The scorecards are often weird, will do things like ask you to write mini-essays with word limits where you get penalised for being over the word count, or where 20% of the bid points are based on a combination of diversity and impact on the local community/environment rather than on who will do the job best at the lowest price.
The entire process is completely broken, and has no reference to good/standard procurement processes in the private sector.
I had an invitation to bid on a government contract that needed local diversity certifications that would cost a bunch of money just to apply. They also had a scale down provision to basically nothing so even if we won there is no guarantee that the contract would cover the cost of certifications. We have list pricing so they wanted us to jump through these hoops and still give them the standard rate. We passed, but if this is our future we’ll have to stop doing list pricing and start charging 5x to 10x extra to cover the hassle of dealing with them.
Now you know why government contracts are so expensive. They have to be, to cover the costs of dealing with the government.
It's not wrong to over-quote a shitty customer by an amount that'd make you willing to deal with their shittiness. That's totally fine on your part actually, since either they take the bid and you make money, or they don't and you don't have to deal with them.
We do list pricing to cut down on marketing costs. Many tenders disallow increasing the price of deliverables over list pricing (it’s an automatic disqualification). You can’t throw in extra stuff either as they reserve the right to remove specific line items after awarding the tender. They write the rules to benefit themselves.
The only way I can increase prices is if I stop having an advertised price and go to a pure ‘contact us for pricing’ model. I can either be mass market at commodity prices or I can target governments at inflated costs but I can’t do both. We’re the last hold out in my niche and eventually we will have to leave the commodity market.
"The system is working as intended".
I once attended an official seminar given by the government procurement department, to an audience of (mostly) government department people with purchase authority. The subject of which was how to construct your invitations to tender such that only the largest 3-4 suppliers could possibly respond. "Solves the problem of having to consider 20-30 suppliers and review their submissions".
I'm so glad that was early on in my career (as a vendor).
I worked for the state and had to participate in procurement. Not only did they do this, but when we were purchasing commonly available things, we purchased them from weird insider vendors whose catalogs were literally photocopies of other catalogs with the prices blacked out.
When I left, people were advising me to become a vendor, which was what a lot of people did as a retirement plan. You'd go to the secret portal and fill out the inscrutable forms, then give them to someone who you probably knew at the special time. Then the state would order things from you, and you would simply order them from Amazon or Uline or whatever. There was also a trade in minority and female figureheads (to white male businesses) to get you prioritized.
Approaching 20yr ago now I sat through a training on the state automotive inspection license for reasons have to do with software that ran it.
Slide 1ish: State cares about emissions, take it very seriously if you want to keep your license.
Slide 2ish: State gives no fucks either way about "safety" inspections, they don't affect squat and aren't worth the money so far as our studies and stats can tell
Slide 3ish: If it wasn't obvious, "safety" is your blank check to sell work and in return the state expects you to take emissions seriously.
The rest of the slides were technicalities and requirements and the final slide was a recap of 1-3.
I too am glad I was exposed to such things early on.
I get that the tax man needs to be paid, but what possible justification could there be for
1. demanding for this data monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly; and
2. demanding it via an annoying bespoke process rather than as an entry in the business's regular tax filing or some other pre-existing regular paperwork that small businesses are already submitting?
Just an anecdote on UK local government tech incompetence: I received a ticket “Failing to comply with a prohibition on certain types of vehicle” from Hackney council. Initially I thought my car had been cloned as I haven’t driven for months, but either a person or an AI had misread my car number plate. It was all just such a waste of time, especially navigating the Ai designed to annoy you into paying.
I think civic workers are generally aware of how much waste exists in their departments, but what is the motivation to change it? Any attempt at "efficiency" could very well backfire and mean the end of their own job.
Why doesn't it just default to "no purchase" if the user doesn't do anything? Logically you'd think this sort of system would only make you log in and do anything if there was anything to report.
Why was it designed the way described in the article to begin with?
government people think in forms, I guess this was originally a paper form you had to submit signed via mail (not email). their logic is that they have to have something signed so they can hold you liable if something is wrong or even fraudulent. when you don't submit they won't know if you forgot or really didn't have any business. they could of course design the system a bit more user friendly but knowing government agencies that means it would involve some highly paid consultants working for several years with an even more hostile user interface
I assume they have no way to track your sales back to this system via whoever else in government you sold to. Defaulting to "nothing" is not reliable because maybe you did and they want to know whether this whole thing is really making any difference.
I think the correct way would be a one-click link in an email though!
It'll be a legal thing. You're reporting on behalf of yourself / a legal entity, so another system or entity can't say for you. I get it, but it really is a waste of time.
Non-governmental, but the whole TV licensing thing is similarly annoying too. Lots of abusive threatening letters pushing you to declare that you don't watch live TV or use iPlayer, and if you do declare that, then they conveniently forget after 2 years anyway, and start harassing you anew :/
I'm don't think it's ridiculous - it's simply a positive acknowledgement you've seen the message, even if there's no action required. The alternative would be repeated reminders until some timeout. I would imagine that timeout might come with an enforcement order, even if you have nothing to declare.
No it makes perfect sense. Otherwise you'd have to endlessly deal with people who "forgot" to tell you they'd done something.
The main problems are a) logging into gov.uk to do it is endlessly tedious, and b) monthly?? I thought all the childcare reconfirmations and security questions were bad enough.
So much UK govt bureaucracy could be removed. Like tax returns - they have the data already, just send me a bill, and let me query it if I disagree (like it works in other European countries). Or Making Tax Digital, which incredibly is worse than the previous system. Or VAT registration/returns which my partner has to do, which overlap with MTD and acts like a kind of second tax system.
I mean, 90% of employees on the UK(I imagine it's probably 99%) don't ever have to file any taxes - it's all done automatically through PAYE. Only in certain specific circumstances you need to file a self assessment. So yes, I sympathise with the administrative burden for UK businesses, but for employees the system is basically better than almost anywhere else in the world.
It's generally correct: If you're self-employed / sole trader and operating outside IR-35, there's no way the HMRC can know how much you were paid as they don't have the info, so they can't know how much tax you owe.
In other situations for payrole / salary (like PAYE for example) they do have the info, as companies have to submit it, so generally people in those situations don't have to submit tax returns (unless they have significant capital gains).
I do think it's a bit annoying you have to declare tax on interest since 2016 if it's over £1000 - previously banks would take it out automatically, and this is still done in other countries (NZ for example).
in a way i like the system in china. they simply force you to use their software to print invoices or receipts on government supplied numbered invoice paper, which automatically reports every sale. if there is no sale you don't need to do anything, because it's practically not possible to make a sale without printing a receipt and have it reported.
for end consumer sales for a while the receipt paper had a scratch field where you could win something. this was to encourage consumers to demand the receipt.
they obviously didn't trust you to self report accurately, but this also reduces the friction, because i don't even need to bother making any reports. i don't think my accountant needs to do anything either. they have access to the same system and probably just verify that i didn't misfile or forget something. of course apart from the printed receipts everything is digital.
Restaurants in Quebec are similar: forcibly integrated into a provincial sales tax system and part of your receipt has some government segment.
Largely because unscrupulous restaurants had, I think they were called “zippers” to perma-erase revenue/transactions.
Some EU countries did a “if you don’t get a receipt, you don’t have to pay”, which erased the concept of a bar tab. During a drinking session with friends, you’d end up with a stack of receipts to pay as you got a receipt with each beer request.
Income taxes are a similar idea: employer pays on your behalf and then you do some manual or virtually automatic reconciliation at the end of the year. Canada is pretty much the latter where the gov already has all the info and you can import it into your tax software where most people don’t have to change anything.
I dunno why countries like sales taxes but low tariffs. Would be easier to tariff imports at a small number of points and let everything internal run free. Why have sales tax on local production.
The more “tax points” you create, the harder it’s going to be to enforce it all.
In Canada, I have to report my (small) self-employment income.
The other thing I have to do is enter deductions like moving expenses, tuition, charitable donations, medical expenses, etc., which the government doesn't have direct access to.
profits are taxed, but VAT captures turnover or revenue, not profits, otherwise if everyone spends all their profits there would be nothing left to tax.
Eh, I was expecting something far worse from the title.
Once a month, an email reminds you to click on a provided link, log in (via saved credentials, one assumes?) and click a single button? I get that it's small frustration, but I suspect there are far more egregious administration inefficiencies in the world of government than this.
(You should try living/working in Germany ;) )
Also to note, the title is a vast overstatement, but I guess "The monthly reporting requirements of the UK Government's Low Value Purchase System is a very minor waste of time, on some occasions" isn't quite so catchy.
Obviously far less - it's 3 mins per person, but you can stop 20 seconds in if it's not relevant to you so those of us who read it all probably don't consider the time wasted.
Also you're not forced to come back and read it again every month which is the real problem.
This blog post title would be better worded "small business owner is surprised by contract term he signed up for".
I mean, it does say it right there in black and white in the Supplier Contract that he signed up for ....
Section 3 CCS - Supplier contract, Reporting Period: "The Supplier must complete an MI Report and return it to CCS by the fifth Working Day of every month during the Term and thereafter until all transactions relating to any Buyer Contract have permanently ceased. If at any point there is a period of a month where no reportable transactions occur, then the Supplier must make a declaration to CCS confirming no business has been conducted, in place of data submission."
I know, to quote the author, "It can be hard running a small business.". But surely at least make an effort to read contracts you sign up to ?
At no point did the author suggest that small businesses were surprised by this requirement - just that it's pointless bureaucracy, which it is.
And that's especially ironic since the whole point of the "Low Value Purchase System" is to make selling to government less time-consuming for small businesses!
> At no point did the author suggest that small businesses were surprised by this requirement - just that it's pointless bureaucracy, which it is.
Well, they are complaining about having to login monthly to file a zero report.
Yes, I agree its bureaucratic, but that's no excuse for not reading the damn contract !
If they read the contract they signed up to, perhaps they would have decided "fuck that" and not bothered signing up in the first place.
P.S. Reading contracts is a good thing, because I bet this guy also missed all the juicy indemnity and liability clauses, some of which are unlimited for "interesting" things such as unlimited indemnity for third-party Intellectual Property claims against the government related to what you supplied them:
10.5 If any claim is made against CCS for actual or alleged infringement of a third party’s intellectual property arising out of, or in connection with, the supply or use of the Offered Deliverables (an "IPR Claim"), then the Supplier indemnifies CCS against all losses, damages, costs or expenses (including professional fees and fines) incurred as a result of the IPR Claim.
> Just because it's in the contract doesn't mean you can't complain if it's a stupid waste of time.
For a start they would be better of complaining to their MP instead of ranting about it on the internet. At least there is a remote chance their MP is in a position to do something about it.
Letter to MP: one letter to MP, nothing to show for it.
Complain on blog: several letters to MPs of different districts, all of whom can now say that their constituents are writing to them and complaining about the same thing.
I don’t know the inner workings of Parliament but this is pretty basic for any remotely democratic government system. One person who cares a lot is less valuable than a lot of people who only care a little.
Bringing more widespread awareness to niche issues most people aren't aware of is, by some infinitesimally small percentage perhaps, more likely to have an impact on bureacracy than trying to act alone. Or maybe they know things aren't going to change, and are complaining on their personal blog to have a vent, which they are perfectly well within their rights to do. Just like you're allowed to complain about their complaining blog post, and I'm allowed to complain about your complaining comments about their complaining blog post. I think your complaining comments about their complaining blog post are rather more annoying and less interesting to read than their complaining blog post, but I suppose you'll probably think my complaining comment about your complaining comments about their annoying blog post are more annoying still :)
My spouse did business at a collector show in Illinois years ago. We filed some sales tax thing, as we collected sales tax (as we were told to do) and remitted it. Did that for... 2 years, IIRC, then didn't do that show again. We got letters threatening that we would be penalized if we didn't fill out the form and remit our collected tax. There was no option to say 'nothing'. I mean... we did one year - put 0. Then we stopped the business. Had multiple emails, physical letters, and hours on the phone being bounced around between places to say "we don't run the business any more - we're not operating". And... no one seemed to have a way to decidedly stop these. We'd get "OK" then... 6 months later got a letter saying "you owe $x and penalties for failing to file"... I was slightly concerned about driving through Illinois at some point, thinking they might have an arrest warrant out for one of us. It took 2 years of not getting these to finally believe we're not in their system any more. Similar story for New Jersey, but it wasn't quite as bad. Still required a lot of manual work.
In South Africa we have a TV license which any shop selling TV’s is required by law to report the buyer’s TV license number for any purchase.
The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.
However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.
Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.
2 years? California chased one guy for taxes for 3 decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_Tax_Board_of_Califor...
Huh, in my state the secretary of state is where you register a business, and you just go to the website and click "this is no longer operating" and then they stop sending you letters to file your 0 taxes.
You’re making a fascinating assumption that the tax authorities’ systems are at all integrated with the Secretary of State systems.
You'd only think that if you misunderstood "in my state" to mean "in all states"
Same.
Thats OK my county keeps threatening to pickup my dog if i dont get a new license. Maybe they have a special kennel for Urns?
I was going to comment "dog license???" but I looked it up for my county and I had no idea this was a thing. I'm in awe. I adopted an adult dog ~9 years ago. He has issued literally one single bark in that span. He stays indoors or in my fenced-in yard 100% of the time because of some health issues. I'm supposed to pay an annual fee for this or they'll fine me?? Nobody ever told me this, not the shelter, not the vet he goes to regularly who presumably has the ability to check this.
There are also apparently canvassers paid by the county who go door to door checking for this?! I'm not the kind of person to typically nitpick about where my taxes are going, but...I retroactively and broadly apologize for every lighthearted jab I may have ever made about TV licensing in the UK. This is beyond dumb in comparison. And my condolences, the fact that this system leads to them harassing you in this way is completely insane.
They’ll just euthanise him. Better pay the license.
>Maybe they have a special kennel for Urns?
Unless a new breed has been named, or an /s was missing, I'm not sure they will be very successful in their recovery attempts.
Illinois online forms are egregiously bad. A couple examples off the top of my head:
I was traveling through the state and got on a toll road by accident without cash to pay the tolls, the toll booth employee said I could just pay online, pointing to a sign that said "missed a toll? pay online at <url>", so we continued our trip intending to pay the tolls online. At the end of the trip, I logged on to pay our tolls--the application insisted that we enter the specific toll IDs of each toll that we missed, even though we didn't know we were supposed to be recording any toll IDs. If you didn't know the toll IDs, you could use a map application to look up the toll IDs, but the map application would crash within a second of opening it and even if you managed to get a screenshot the resolution was so low that the text was indecipherable. When I called the support number, they told me that I would be fined triple the cost of the tolls if I didn't pay within a week, but I would be able to pay without knowing the specific toll IDs that I missed. When I asked the agent to tell me what tolls I missed (clearly they knew if they were going to fine me), they told me they couldn't tell me for another week. I pointed out that this would be after the toll deadline and they relentlessly tried to avoid acknowledging that simple fact. Eventually I sent them my best guess about what I owed with a letter stating what I had attempted and that I would contact a lawyer about any fines and never heard from them again.
Some years later, after moving to Chicago, I had to file state taxes for the first time. The state issued me a driver's license with a 12 digit number, but the state tax form only allowed me to authenticate with an 8 digit Illinois driver's license number (the other acceptable forms of identification didn't apply to me for reasons I no longer remember).
I feel like half of these are quickly resolved in court when you explain what happened and the judge calls the state a bunch of fucking morons and dismisses the case. But the other half of the time the judge won't use common sense. Also the state is relying on you not wanting to show up in front of a judge out of your own state to contest what I presume is a relatively small amount of dollars.
Illinois is one of the most administratively fucked up and corrupt states in the country. Four of the last ten governors have been so bad they actually served prison time and the current governor appears to be cut from the same cloth.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/4-of-illinois-past-10-governo...
Why would they ever fix the system. Some number of people will just pay it and those people are pure profit. Heck, fixing the system costs money.
It's the same evil math behind every other billing scam that sails under the flag of ignorance.
Speaking of ignorance, to all those people saying you forgot to fill out a form, there are several states that are known to be maliciously sloppy about this sort of thing. You file a form and they silently reject it or billing you anyway on some questionable pretext because they can. NY is one of them. Doesn't surprise me that IL is too since both states are kinda cash strapped.
>Why would they ever fix the system. Some number of people will just pay it and those people are pure profit. Heck, fixing the system costs money.
The system is run by employees of whatever agency handles taxes. Neither the employees nor the agency keep a portion of the taxes. If they do not have the money or will to fix it, people are supposed to pressure their representatives to give them the money and mandate.
If this truly came down to an intent to squeeze more money out of people than they owed, that would almost always come from the law's wording. Again, pressure the representatives.
The only times an agency would squeeze money is when it's funded in large part by fines or fees, or if an employee is committing fraud and pocketing some of the money.
You can't just start collecting sales tax before registering with the state, and likewise to stop collecting you need to deregister. It is a fairly standard procedures every accountant is aware of.
If you are on a framework, that gives prospective public sector buyers assurance that certain basic checks/ due-dilligence about your business has already been done. So even if you have not made a sale to a public sector entity in recent times but are on a framework then makes sense to keep your details up-to-date...
I work in UK Government and the problem is that procurement depts are so afraid of awarding tenders to dodgy suppliers they add so many layers of bureaucracy that it prevents local or more innovative contractors. The rules are much more flexible for low value tenders <£30k but it is a very exclusionary system.
Please realise there are many civil servants and local government officers that realise the system is overly bureaucratic and are encouraging procurement teams to change their processes, but it is mostly dictated by national legislation.
I think allowing mayoral authorities to flex their procurement systems for innovative solutions would be a good testing ground. The whole point of devolution is to allow areas to spend money locally how they see fit and it can become a bit of a laboratory for new, risky ideas that - if they pay off - can be copied by other places.
> procurement depts are so afraid of awarding tenders to dodgy suppliers they add so many layers of bureaucracy that it prevents local or more innovative contractors
a/k/a regulatory capture. Large established vendors can afford the staffing to deal with this, small startups either cannot or they miss an obscure step in the process and they are excluded.
I don't think it will change even with devolution. Given enough time it will certainly be back to where they were.
Every single time they replace an old system with something else they all manage to add additional complicity. Don't know if you get to use HERA in your department but it is a complete pile of mess.
Their medium value purchase system is a waste of time too - I work for a small business that does government contracts and you have to pay the government just for the pleasure of bidding for contracts.
Then every bid has it's own unique weird things, where often you are told who you are bidding against and sometimes even how much the government wants to pay!
The scorecards are often weird, will do things like ask you to write mini-essays with word limits where you get penalised for being over the word count, or where 20% of the bid points are based on a combination of diversity and impact on the local community/environment rather than on who will do the job best at the lowest price.
The entire process is completely broken, and has no reference to good/standard procurement processes in the private sector.
I had an invitation to bid on a government contract that needed local diversity certifications that would cost a bunch of money just to apply. They also had a scale down provision to basically nothing so even if we won there is no guarantee that the contract would cover the cost of certifications. We have list pricing so they wanted us to jump through these hoops and still give them the standard rate. We passed, but if this is our future we’ll have to stop doing list pricing and start charging 5x to 10x extra to cover the hassle of dealing with them.
Now you know why government contracts are so expensive. They have to be, to cover the costs of dealing with the government.
It's not wrong to over-quote a shitty customer by an amount that'd make you willing to deal with their shittiness. That's totally fine on your part actually, since either they take the bid and you make money, or they don't and you don't have to deal with them.
We do list pricing to cut down on marketing costs. Many tenders disallow increasing the price of deliverables over list pricing (it’s an automatic disqualification). You can’t throw in extra stuff either as they reserve the right to remove specific line items after awarding the tender. They write the rules to benefit themselves.
The only way I can increase prices is if I stop having an advertised price and go to a pure ‘contact us for pricing’ model. I can either be mass market at commodity prices or I can target governments at inflated costs but I can’t do both. We’re the last hold out in my niche and eventually we will have to leave the commodity market.
"The system is working as intended". I once attended an official seminar given by the government procurement department, to an audience of (mostly) government department people with purchase authority. The subject of which was how to construct your invitations to tender such that only the largest 3-4 suppliers could possibly respond. "Solves the problem of having to consider 20-30 suppliers and review their submissions". I'm so glad that was early on in my career (as a vendor).
I worked for the state and had to participate in procurement. Not only did they do this, but when we were purchasing commonly available things, we purchased them from weird insider vendors whose catalogs were literally photocopies of other catalogs with the prices blacked out.
When I left, people were advising me to become a vendor, which was what a lot of people did as a retirement plan. You'd go to the secret portal and fill out the inscrutable forms, then give them to someone who you probably knew at the special time. Then the state would order things from you, and you would simply order them from Amazon or Uline or whatever. There was also a trade in minority and female figureheads (to white male businesses) to get you prioritized.
Approaching 20yr ago now I sat through a training on the state automotive inspection license for reasons have to do with software that ran it.
Slide 1ish: State cares about emissions, take it very seriously if you want to keep your license.
Slide 2ish: State gives no fucks either way about "safety" inspections, they don't affect squat and aren't worth the money so far as our studies and stats can tell
Slide 3ish: If it wasn't obvious, "safety" is your blank check to sell work and in return the state expects you to take emissions seriously.
The rest of the slides were technicalities and requirements and the final slide was a recap of 1-3.
I too am glad I was exposed to such things early on.
I get that the tax man needs to be paid, but what possible justification could there be for
1. demanding for this data monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly; and
2. demanding it via an annoying bespoke process rather than as an entry in the business's regular tax filing or some other pre-existing regular paperwork that small businesses are already submitting?
This doesn't look like anything to do with tax. You would definitely need to cover it in the normal tax return in addition to this.
Just an anecdote on UK local government tech incompetence: I received a ticket “Failing to comply with a prohibition on certain types of vehicle” from Hackney council. Initially I thought my car had been cloned as I haven’t driven for months, but either a person or an AI had misread my car number plate. It was all just such a waste of time, especially navigating the Ai designed to annoy you into paying.
> So the GCA are wasting everyone's time and do not track how annoying it is.
I am 80% sure that someone is aware how much waste there is, but nobody wants to / is able to change the process. Just like many other organizations.
I think civic workers are generally aware of how much waste exists in their departments, but what is the motivation to change it? Any attempt at "efficiency" could very well backfire and mean the end of their own job.
For most civic workers menial tasks are the bane of their existence. You are not going to get fired for doing your job correctly
Why doesn't it just default to "no purchase" if the user doesn't do anything? Logically you'd think this sort of system would only make you log in and do anything if there was anything to report.
Why was it designed the way described in the article to begin with?
government people think in forms, I guess this was originally a paper form you had to submit signed via mail (not email). their logic is that they have to have something signed so they can hold you liable if something is wrong or even fraudulent. when you don't submit they won't know if you forgot or really didn't have any business. they could of course design the system a bit more user friendly but knowing government agencies that means it would involve some highly paid consultants working for several years with an even more hostile user interface
I assume they have no way to track your sales back to this system via whoever else in government you sold to. Defaulting to "nothing" is not reliable because maybe you did and they want to know whether this whole thing is really making any difference.
I think the correct way would be a one-click link in an email though!
It'll be a legal thing. You're reporting on behalf of yourself / a legal entity, so another system or entity can't say for you. I get it, but it really is a waste of time.
Because then you don't have the "I forgot" excuse.
The ridiculous system of "you have to tell us you've done nothing" seems endemic in the UK government.
Non-governmental, but the whole TV licensing thing is similarly annoying too. Lots of abusive threatening letters pushing you to declare that you don't watch live TV or use iPlayer, and if you do declare that, then they conveniently forget after 2 years anyway, and start harassing you anew :/
I'm don't think it's ridiculous - it's simply a positive acknowledgement you've seen the message, even if there's no action required. The alternative would be repeated reminders until some timeout. I would imagine that timeout might come with an enforcement order, even if you have nothing to declare.
No it makes perfect sense. Otherwise you'd have to endlessly deal with people who "forgot" to tell you they'd done something.
The main problems are a) logging into gov.uk to do it is endlessly tedious, and b) monthly?? I thought all the childcare reconfirmations and security questions were bad enough.
Government employees and departments need performance incentives. And not ones that are so far removed from their day-to-day as "voting."
So much UK govt bureaucracy could be removed. Like tax returns - they have the data already, just send me a bill, and let me query it if I disagree (like it works in other European countries). Or Making Tax Digital, which incredibly is worse than the previous system. Or VAT registration/returns which my partner has to do, which overlap with MTD and acts like a kind of second tax system.
I’ve never submitted a tax return in the UK as a simple PAYE employee.
In another European country where I work (Finland) it’s as you describe but it’s still more than doing absolutely nothing that I did in the UK.
You are going to love Digital VAT, closely followed by Real-Time VAT.
I mean, 90% of employees on the UK(I imagine it's probably 99%) don't ever have to file any taxes - it's all done automatically through PAYE. Only in certain specific circumstances you need to file a self assessment. So yes, I sympathise with the administrative burden for UK businesses, but for employees the system is basically better than almost anywhere else in the world.
Why are people down-voting this?
It's generally correct: If you're self-employed / sole trader and operating outside IR-35, there's no way the HMRC can know how much you were paid as they don't have the info, so they can't know how much tax you owe.
In other situations for payrole / salary (like PAYE for example) they do have the info, as companies have to submit it, so generally people in those situations don't have to submit tax returns (unless they have significant capital gains).
I do think it's a bit annoying you have to declare tax on interest since 2016 if it's over £1000 - previously banks would take it out automatically, and this is still done in other countries (NZ for example).
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative it seems.
They should just have a "suspend account" option. You file a nil return once, suspend, never come back unless you have to. Seems easy enough.
in a way i like the system in china. they simply force you to use their software to print invoices or receipts on government supplied numbered invoice paper, which automatically reports every sale. if there is no sale you don't need to do anything, because it's practically not possible to make a sale without printing a receipt and have it reported.
for end consumer sales for a while the receipt paper had a scratch field where you could win something. this was to encourage consumers to demand the receipt.
they obviously didn't trust you to self report accurately, but this also reduces the friction, because i don't even need to bother making any reports. i don't think my accountant needs to do anything either. they have access to the same system and probably just verify that i didn't misfile or forget something. of course apart from the printed receipts everything is digital.
Restaurants in Quebec are similar: forcibly integrated into a provincial sales tax system and part of your receipt has some government segment.
Largely because unscrupulous restaurants had, I think they were called “zippers” to perma-erase revenue/transactions.
Some EU countries did a “if you don’t get a receipt, you don’t have to pay”, which erased the concept of a bar tab. During a drinking session with friends, you’d end up with a stack of receipts to pay as you got a receipt with each beer request.
Income taxes are a similar idea: employer pays on your behalf and then you do some manual or virtually automatic reconciliation at the end of the year. Canada is pretty much the latter where the gov already has all the info and you can import it into your tax software where most people don’t have to change anything.
I dunno why countries like sales taxes but low tariffs. Would be easier to tariff imports at a small number of points and let everything internal run free. Why have sales tax on local production.
The more “tax points” you create, the harder it’s going to be to enforce it all.
In Canada, I have to report my (small) self-employment income.
The other thing I have to do is enter deductions like moving expenses, tuition, charitable donations, medical expenses, etc., which the government doesn't have direct access to.
Some people don't realize that receipts are not for them (the customer).
They're to make sure employees ring up the sale (and don't pocket the money)
and now I understand they're for the government too, to make sure taxes are paid.
tariffs wouldn't capture anything locally produced.
Which is great!
Give the local producers of any size a bit of subsidy instead a dog’s breakfast of programs to accomplish the same with a ton of friction.
Probably wouldn’t work well in China, but here in Canada…
Aren't local profits taxed?
profits are taxed, but VAT captures turnover or revenue, not profits, otherwise if everyone spends all their profits there would be nothing left to tax.
Isn't that just VAT?
Eh, I was expecting something far worse from the title.
Once a month, an email reminds you to click on a provided link, log in (via saved credentials, one assumes?) and click a single button? I get that it's small frustration, but I suspect there are far more egregious administration inefficiencies in the world of government than this.
(You should try living/working in Germany ;) )
Also to note, the title is a vast overstatement, but I guess "The monthly reporting requirements of the UK Government's Low Value Purchase System is a very minor waste of time, on some occasions" isn't quite so catchy.
This reminds me of the terry gilliam movie Brazil, with dystopian bureaucracy...
I think "machine readable" in UK government parlance might just mean 'not hard copy' but I'm not 100%.
And how much time have humans collectively wasted reading this article?
Obviously far less - it's 3 mins per person, but you can stop 20 seconds in if it's not relevant to you so those of us who read it all probably don't consider the time wasted.
Also you're not forced to come back and read it again every month which is the real problem.
I'd like a refund on the time I spent reading your comment.
I've spent cumulatively much more time comparing SVGs of pelicans, and we know who's responsible for that...
Hah, fair!
This blog post title would be better worded "small business owner is surprised by contract term he signed up for".
I mean, it does say it right there in black and white in the Supplier Contract that he signed up for ....
I know, to quote the author, "It can be hard running a small business.". But surely at least make an effort to read contracts you sign up to ?At no point did the author suggest that small businesses were surprised by this requirement - just that it's pointless bureaucracy, which it is.
And that's especially ironic since the whole point of the "Low Value Purchase System" is to make selling to government less time-consuming for small businesses!
> At no point did the author suggest that small businesses were surprised by this requirement - just that it's pointless bureaucracy, which it is.
Well, they are complaining about having to login monthly to file a zero report.
Yes, I agree its bureaucratic, but that's no excuse for not reading the damn contract !
If they read the contract they signed up to, perhaps they would have decided "fuck that" and not bothered signing up in the first place.
P.S. Reading contracts is a good thing, because I bet this guy also missed all the juicy indemnity and liability clauses, some of which are unlimited for "interesting" things such as unlimited indemnity for third-party Intellectual Property claims against the government related to what you supplied them:
How do you know they didn't read the contract and know exactly what would be required of them?
Just because it's in the contract doesn't mean you can't complain if it's a stupid waste of time.
> Just because it's in the contract doesn't mean you can't complain if it's a stupid waste of time.
For a start they would be better of complaining to their MP instead of ranting about it on the internet. At least there is a remote chance their MP is in a position to do something about it.
Letter to MP: one letter to MP, nothing to show for it.
Complain on blog: several letters to MPs of different districts, all of whom can now say that their constituents are writing to them and complaining about the same thing.
I don’t know the inner workings of Parliament but this is pretty basic for any remotely democratic government system. One person who cares a lot is less valuable than a lot of people who only care a little.
Bringing more widespread awareness to niche issues most people aren't aware of is, by some infinitesimally small percentage perhaps, more likely to have an impact on bureacracy than trying to act alone. Or maybe they know things aren't going to change, and are complaining on their personal blog to have a vent, which they are perfectly well within their rights to do. Just like you're allowed to complain about their complaining blog post, and I'm allowed to complain about your complaining comments about their complaining blog post. I think your complaining comments about their complaining blog post are rather more annoying and less interesting to read than their complaining blog post, but I suppose you'll probably think my complaining comment about your complaining comments about their annoying blog post are more annoying still :)
Terence Eden's blog is very influential in the world of the UK technology civil service.
Writing about it there is a lot more likely to have a positive result than writing to his MP.
The author is a former civil servant. I think it's safe to assume he knows that writing to his MP is an option...