I bet it's a case of ... "One hand giveth etc ..."

Don’t you just hate it when you pick up the mail and find one of those thick brown government envelopes ?

Well, last week I received one. … Oh ! shit … I thought, I bet the tax man thinks that I have some extra cash stashed away somewhere (which of course I don’t) and wants his share, or else he wants a bit more of the pension I slaved and sweated .. grafted .. worked .. pissed about for all my life.

Here we go ! … I thought as I opened the envelope and discovered several pages. I expected to find the usual questionaire about what I had earned since the days of pounds, shillings and pence and what I had spent on travel in the days before motorways and parking meters.

Then I noticed that the covering letter was not from ‘Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’, but from ‘The Pensions Service’. The enclosed documents contained bewildering sets of figures regarding the various amounts deducted from my pay over the years as contributions towards my state pension, and the details of how much I had been paid each week since I retired.

OK ! … I said to myself … So how much do they want me to pay back ?  …. and then …

BINGO ! … I suddenly noticed the following … “We will make a payment of £1,616 (approx. $2,500) into your account. This is the money we owe you“.  Yes, the buggers had been under-paying me by about four quid a week since I put my feet up back in 2004.

Now that is not the end of the story, because today I received another brown envelope from the same people informing me that I would receive a further payment of £173 (approx. $250) ..”to cover any loss of use of this money”.

So a good result so far, but I can’t see the blood suckers at Her good old Maj’s Revenue and Customs Dept. letting me get away with it, and that the next brown envelope will probably herald that …

… “the tax man cometh” !