After a bitter battle of wills, I eventually paid an outstanding tax bill of £1640.00 yesterday morning after receiving sinister threats and the prospect of legal action from the Inland Revenue.

It is not that I dispute the amount, I owe it fair and square. However, by their own admission, the revenue also owe me money, just over £1300.00 in overpaid company tax and NI from 2011.

For the last couple of months I have stood firm and said that I will pay them the money I owe them from this year, when they pay me what they owe me from 2011. I even made a more sensible suggestion and offered to make a direct CHAPS payment of the balance between the two.

Sadly, the tax office don’t operate in a way that is fair to both parties and despite their threats towards me, I am in no legal position to start charging interest or threatening them with legal action on their unpaid debt. It would appear they can keep my money for as long as they want.

If you operate in an income bracket between 25-100k a year, you are pretty much screwed all ends up. You are neither poorly enough to claim taxation support, or wealthy enough to bribe the tax office and political parties in to allowing you to pay your salary in the Cayman Islands.

I have long accepted my status as a mug but it seems that I am bigger one than I thought. I discovered this week that my driving license had expired and that because of this, the Courts of Justice have been unable to accept my payment of £60 or put three points on my license. I have been given two weeks to sort this out or I will be summoned to Winchester magistrate’s court to face trial.

For some reason, I always had it in my head that that my license expired in 2033. However, at some point in my life, I must have stupidly applied for a photo card equivalent. I can’t remember doing this but I did get one, obviously unaware that it is in fact a scam, a license that it runs out when the DVLA fancy it, meaning they can charge me £20.00 to do something I was originally told I could do until 2033.

If you have a passport that is less than five years old you can do this online and make a BACS payment direct from your bank. If your passport is older, you have to fill out a form full of vague questions, complete The Daily Telegraph crossword in five minutes and beat Garry Kasparov at chess.

You can’t fill out a form online, and you can’t make an internet payment, you have to write a cheque or….Honestly, this is true…SEND A POSTAL ORDER! Who on God’s planet still uses postal orders?

I haven’t written a cheque for about a decade and the last time I saw a postal order was in a birthday card from my Grandmother at around the same time I was bedecked in clothing from Brentford Nylons and BBC presenters were interfering with children. Who on earth put that form together…Mary Whitehouse?

The last time I saw a postal order nylon was still in fashion.

So this week, I have been beaten into submission by the State, I have paid my tax bill without knowing when they will refund me what they owe and I have ordered a license to do something I have been qualified to do since 1987. I am doing my bit to help fund the state and for that, we, the middle income tax payers, should be eternally grateful.

We should be grateful that our Government is tackling the economy head on by sacking a librarian for spending too much money on custard creams when ginger snaps were two for the price of one and we should be grateful that Ian Duncan-Monotone-Useless-Smith has pissed up the wall, £34 million (and counting) of tax payers money on an IT system that doesn’t work.

He says it’s not his fault…Whose fault is it then?

Mine I expect.