Yesterday I spent a few hours attempting to sort out my National Insurance (NI) payments. NI is usually paid, like tax as a percentage of your salary to the Government and used to cover things like the State Pension and for some other benefits. If you are not in paid employment, you can make voluntary contributions to cover any potential shortfall in your state pension.
Now, you would expect the process to be fairly straight forward. The simplest method, to me, seems to be that you should be able to go online and check your pension forecast and NI contributions to see if there are any gaps. You should then be able to make a payment online which would be linked to your NI number. It probably doesn’t matter too much which year it’s for, providing that you are able to show that you’ve covered enough years.
Instead, having checked my contributions via the handy government website and app and knowing already that I had a gap for last year, I had to phone HMRC in order to be given the account number to pay into, along with a unique 18 digit reference number to include with it. “What could go wrong with that?” I hear you ironically wonder. It does seem a recipe for error doesn’t it? So, I was mildly concerned too to see that a similar voluntary payment from the previous year didn’t appear to show yet on my records. So, I thought I would check up on this too, just in case my contribution last time had accidentally gone into someone else’s name due to a stray number.
So, I rang the number and listened to a recorded message telling me that my call was important to them for just under one hour. Eventually I got through to someone. I asked for the reference number expecting this to be given after a few seconds of processing to create it. Instead, the person then demanded to know if I’d first called another number, the Pensions Forecast line to find out whether I needed to and was eligible to make a payment. I explained again that I had checked these details on line. This wasn’t enough for them. Because the call was being recorded, they needed to tell me to check with the pensions forecasting line.
I tried again and then made the mistake of mentioning that I had also noticed an unrecorded payment. She then wanted to know the exact date and amount of the payment so she could check it on the system. I responded that I didn’t have those details immediately to hand and was unable to find them quickly. She was about to put me on hold and send me off to search through my statements like a naughty school boy who has failed the test. So, I suggested we left that bit and just proceeded to generate the reference number. Eventually she did this, though with deep reluctance.
Later in the afternoon, I phoned through to check up on the missing payment, having found the date and amount. A further one hour wait in the queue and then a much more helpful person explained that it looked like the payment, although received had not yet been allocated to the appropriate year yet and so was not appearing in the records. It’s almost a year to the date since I made that payment.
It seemed that the system had been set up to make it as hard as possible, rather than as easy as possible for me to do something I was more than happy to. It seems to be a system designed to encourage mistakes and errors, leading to further phone calls and waiting. It seems to be a system designed to make the job of the people working for HRMC as difficult as possible and to make it likely for us, the taxpayers to give up.
As I’ve suggested above, there are far more efficient ways of doing this. As it happens, I also top up my pension pot from when I was in employment each year and it’s very easy to do that in comparison. I doubt though that anyone who is in a position to change the process is reading my blog.
However, as I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, we can choose in church life either to make it easy for people to do good and helpful things or hard. How easy is it for them to join your church and get involved (beyond that they can give their testimony)? How easy is it for them to commit to serve on a ministry team? How easy is it for them to find where you meet? You will be able to think of examples.
There are two sides to this. First, the process, is it unnecessarily complicated and inefficient? Second, the people involved. In the UK, we are in the habit of putting people in place like the proverbial traditional doctor’s receptionist (actually ours is really helpful) who see themselves as a kind of gate keeper. They take it upon themselves to be the one who filters out who is serious and who isn’t. Are there people like that in your church who actually give off the impression that they would prefer not to see new people involved?
Keep reviewing how you do things as a church. It should be hard for people to do things they shouldn’t be doing but easy for them to do good things, especially when they want to.
Faithroots 