Jayne Dowle: Nobody understands our tax system, not even the people we pay to run it

The news that up to 1.4 million of us may face demands from the Inland Revenue to repay 3.8bn in underpaid tax will be striking fear in innocent people.

I am hoping that I'm fully paid up and no nasty surprises await. My lovely accountant does my tax every year. I never, ever begrudge the couple of hundred pounds it costs me for her to make sense of all my incomings and outgoings and chewed-up receipts.

But you can never take anything for granted with HM Revenue & Customs. Even when I have paid my tax, I still live in fear of coming home to a demand telling me there has been a miscalculation and I owe thousands. For like all those unfortunate taxpayers who will be asked to hand over, on average, 1,428, I just don't have that sort of spare change lying around.

Have the people who run the Inland Revenue got any idea about the distress that they are causing? When workers have already got the

threat of unemployment looming over their heads, rising food prices to contend with, and a VAT increase on the way, the last thing they want is another bill to pay.

Those on low incomes, already stretched to the limit, will literally, have no way of paying. What will the tax officers do then? Pursue them through the courts for a "crime" they didn't even know they had committed? Yet again, ordinary people are being criminalised. No wonder so many duck out of the system and take cash-in-hand jobs.

What ever you blame for the fiasco, it is clear is that yet again, a computerised government system is at fault.

Like tax credits, the Child Support Agency and the NHS, millions of pounds have been spent on creating a set-up which simply cannot cope with demand. This is not to mention the fees paid to all those private consultants who will have been appointed to advise, while ordinary public sector workers face cutbacks and job losses.

Of course, some lucky souls will find themselves with a pre-Christmas bonus if they have actually paid too much tax. But now we hear that there could be up to 18 million errors on file dating back years. As I said, you can never take anything for granted with the taxman. It is this powerlessness, this sense of being completely at his mercy, which is so terrifying.

I am sure that if I had a month to spare, I could fill in my own tax return. But I take one look at it and freeze, much in the same way as I used to do when faced with a set of maths exam questions involving logarithms.

"Tax doesn't have to be taxing"? I don't think so. Those patronising

ads make me want to throw something at the television. It adds insult to injury when you know that if you get one tiny calculation wrong you're in big trouble. I wouldn't trust myself to do my tax return properly. And on a good day, I have at least two brain cells to rub together.

For many people though, especially young workers, the elderly, and

those whose English is not good, the prospect of appealing against a demand will be inconceivable.

Attempt to call the so-called helplines and you better make yourself a flask of coffee and some sandwiches, because you will be on hold for a long, long time. And before you chew your nails off in frustration, spare a thought for those on the other end of the line. It's not their fault. Like you, they are only doing their job. They might even find themselves owing money too.

Our tax system is fiendishly complicated. Obviously, all these errors have not occurred overnight. I suspect that like me, your eyes glazed over when Gordon Brown droned on about a tax cut here and a claw-back there, as he desperately tried to balance the books in his Budgets.

But what we have ended up with is a system so Byzantine in its

complexity, no-one understands it, not even the people who are paid to run it.

And all the clever computers in the world can't compensate for the fact that the way we work has changed. The truth is, the Inland Revenue hasn't caught up with that. Keeping the same tax-code belongs to a

time when generally, workers had one job, and held that job for a considerable length of time.

Now we've got people doing two or three jobs, or maybe like me, are part -PAYE and part self-employed. If you work on commission, or find your hours suddenly cut, the coding arrangement can't catch up quickly enough.

I've no idea how to get us out of this mess, but I'd say one thing. Rather than spend millions of pounds chasing innocent people for money which they "owe", direct the resources at reforming the system and making it as simple as possible. And this time, ask those who have to use it what they think first.