Over the weekend, I completed – and sent off – my Self-Assessment Tax Return to Your Friends And Mine at HMCE.  The deadline for receiving them is October 31st (i.e. this Saturday) so I’ve only just scraped it this year, having been really really good with it last year.

I know, I could do it all online, and have ’til January 31st to fill it in etc. – but I still don’t trust the online system. I wrote about this a couple of years back, and my feelings are still the same. Mainly, I’m happy to spend the money and use the Special Delivery stuff to get the tax return in – it just means I’ve got a signed confirmation that the Tax Return has been received where it’s been sent.  I’ve been bitten by that before, the entire “Oh no, we haven’t received it” from HMCE. Of course, if you say you haven’t received something from them, it’s a case of “Well we sent it, so you must have received it”, but it’s not the same thing when it’s time to send stuff to them.

Basically, when it comes to sending documents to HMCE, it always pays to be paranoid. Always assume that they are either :

1. Vindictive
2. Inefficient beyond the dreams of man
3. Both

and you’ll be OK.

It’s because of that – OK, it’s partly because of that – that I still don’t trust the online submission of tax returns. Yes, you can be pretty sure they’ve received it – but when it comes to HMRC, “pretty sure” simply isn’t sure enough. I feel the same way about HMCE’s online submission as I do about the people who store all their important data/files with Google, Amazon or some other internet cloud-based server – in other words, “Expect it to get lost. Expect it to get hacked.”

My tax return is on paper. Yes, I know it’ll end up being clocked in to the HMCE ‘System’. That’s fine. But letting their system be the only place it’s held? Sod that. I’ve got a photocopy of the tax return. I know where the figures came from, and I’ve got them recorded. I expect HMCE’s copy of the document to get lost, edited, hacked or mislaid. If/when it happens, I’ve got my own hard-copy backup.  If you’ve done all the calculations on-line and not printed out the results (or even better, screenshots) and/or received confirmation from the system of those figures, what proof have you got of what you filled in?

Even if it’s simply that the electronic version gets corrupted, if HMCE also have it on paper then there’s some way they can recover the information without me even needing to be involved. If they only have an electronic version, then lots of people are going to be screwed if anything does happen.

So while I can, I’ll stick with doing my tax return on paper and sending it in to them. When they eventually go to “Online only”, I’ll still make sure I’ve got a printout of the entire thing, along with all the figures I’ve used to calculate it.

Call me paranoid, I don’t mind. Frankly, I’ve been kicked in the nuts by HMCE too many times to not be paranoid. And that’s not paranoia – that’s just common sense.

Of course, you also have to bear in mind that 911 was the main emergency number in the US well before the advent of 9/11, (or 11/9 – whichever you prefer) and there was always speculation that the date was chosen for exactly that reason.

As a result, I suspect there might be a few security agencies wondering whether 9/9/9 might be planned to be of similar significance/utilityin the UK…

I still find it hard to understand the certainty of the Government and Security Forces that terrorist attacks will happen again on aeroplanes. Maybe they know something I don’t.

To me, security – or at least the perception of security – comes about through making easy targets into harder targets. When it comes to home security, we don’t look at making our houses completely thief-proof. We look at making them into a harder target than my neighbours.

In my opinion, people in general – whether it be your everyday office worker, a burglar, a politician, or a terrorist – are lazy. They’re not going to do something difficult if they can do something easy.

On the terrorism front, airports are (in theory at least) the hardest target around now. Bear in mind though that I’m still a firm believer in ‘Security Theatre‘ – so airports at least appear to be the hardest target. They’re certainly more hassle than (for example) sitting on a bus or a train.

So I find it hard to understand that conviction that planes are still the prime target. Personally I’d probably be trying to look at anything but planes and airports.

This post has been deleted, on the request of Ian Corbett, Marketing Manager of Toyota Ireland, and his legal advisers.

For more explanation, see here.

Yesterday, I got three spam emails attempting to go phishing for my log-in details.

Now, as I’ve said before many times, I feel that anyone who responds through these phishing emails deserves everything they get for being a bell-end and clicking on links in random emails. (Particularly when they then go to some very odd URLs that have nothing to do with the bank in question – in this case www.mybank.alliance-leicesterXXX.com)

And if anyone responded to any of these particular three emails, then they’re even more deserving of getting ripped off. In fact I’d then go so far as to simply term it as an idiot tax.

Because the subject line for all of these email addresses was :

Secure Message from Alliance & Liecester

And if you don’t spot that in the email, and still click on the links, you damn well deserve to lose your information/money.

Over the weekend, I noticed that Sainsbury’s (and, I assume, the other supermarkets) are now operating a “Think 25″ policy, where if you’re buying items that are prohibited under a certain age, you’ll get asked for ID first.

What items are we talking about? Well, to my knowledge – and this isn’t a comprehensive list, although I could probably find one if I tried – it consists of :

• Cigarettes  (18 or over – it used to be 16, but changed in October 2007)
• Alcohol (18 or over)
• Blades – knives, razor-blades etc. (18 or over)

It used to be that if you looked under eighteen, you’d be asked for ID. Fair enough – 18 was the limit for most of the age-limited items.

Then the stores started getting paranoid about customers who just “looked” 18 getting through the system, so they invoked the “Check 21″ policy, where even though you were legally allowed to buy said products, if you looked up to three years older than that, you would still get asked for ID – and not allowed to purchase the products if you didn’t have ID.

Now they appear to be even twitchier about it, and the “ask for ID” limit is 25 – and that’s if you look 25, not whether you are or not. So a whole seven years more of being asked for ID.

And the really stupid bit? The entire thing is voluntary – which means it’s perfectly legal for the only-just 18 till-person to sell the (for example) beer, but ask ID of someone who looks up to seven years older before they can sell it.

Totally barmy.