General Chat

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finances for King Louis XIV of France said:

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose at Christmas as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing". ;-)

Few Governments have ever made taxation popular. Ordinary people are paying heavily for having too much trust in those in control of the political & financial institutions.

You're not far off track at all Bob. Often, whenever CASH changes hands there is a fiddle, sometimes a string quartet.
My wife and I in recent years have been "relieved" of ten of thousands of pounds without a receipt.

Seeing as we are on the subject of money laundering, (well, sort of) did you know that banks will not allow payments to third parties in cash. Last week my wife tried to pay £100 in to the grandson's building society account, and they refused it. She had to pay the cash in to her account at the bank, and transfer it. What a palaver. What with that and my doctor no longer issuing repeat prescriptions except through the local pharmacy I think we are becoming a non-user-friendly society. In London you can't even get on a bus and pay cash, it is Oyster card or contactless debit card. Heaven knows what tourists do. Sorry, I've gone off track a bit there.

We are all (most of us) knowingly or unwittingly guilty of allowing this problem to persist. We hire these people who may or may not be insured. We don't get a timetable they stick to. We pay cash, we don't get receipts.
HOW DO YOU TRACE CASH. ? all to save a few quid that would be better spent getting the job done properly and promptly.
Get more the one estimate
Get a time table
Pay by cheque.
Get a receipt

They go for the easy target David, the law-abiding but might have made a small error.

It puzzles me how there is so much tax evasion in the black economy going undetected by the Inland Revenue. The black economy takes away work from honest trades people because they cannot compete on price. No doubt some trades people go out of business because of this.
There was a time when Mafia were getting away with murder because of bribery and corruption and intimidation. People in crime did not fear the Police and bought witnesses in jurys to avoid prosecution.
However one Alphonse Capone was brought to trial on tax evasion and died in Alcatraz.
Is our present day black economy too puny to warrant sufficient investigation by those who Police the Inland Revenue ?