In the middle ages, the legal system was a profitable source of income for the kings and barons who controlled it. Fines paid by the peasantry went straight into the purses of the very people who imposed them. Predictably, the number of pretexts for fining the peasants kept increasing.

It seems that Britain is now reverting to the feudal system, and a committee of MPs agrees. There has been a considerable growth in the number of pretexts for separating us poor serfs from the few groats left to us after the tax man has had his regular cut. The latest example is the aggressive levying of “late payment fees” for overdue paperwork. It might be argued that it is legitimate to discourage undue delay in submitting necessary returns, but the fact that it is being made harder than ever to do all the form-filling in the prescribed manner suggests that is not the real purpose.

Registering tax returns online ought to make the process easier – in theory – but HM Revenue and Customs have succeeded in making it as difficult as a medieval quest.

The first challenge is making sense of a poorly designed website. Then you must register – which inevitably took several attempts. Only when you have registered are you told that you have to wait seven days for an “activation code” – this while on a deadline of the Revenue’s making. Predictably it did not turn up. This initiated the next challenge, a spectacularly unhelpful “help desk”. This took the form of Ordeal By Call Centre – the usual ten minutes of multiple choice on a telephone keypad and queuing before being granted the right to speak to an ignorant apprentice on a temporary contract.

In accordance with the traditional format of quest literature, your knight errant had to go through the Ordeal three times before finding the truth – that the request made ten days before had never been processed.

When the code turned up only a week late, it seemed like a miracle – but several failed attempts to download the required software necessitated a return to the dreaded “help desk”. This time, however, a genuine human being had accidentally been employed. He gave some useful tips on their unusual downloading procedures and admitted cheerfully, “Everyone has to come here sooner or later – you could never work it out on your own.” True.

Finally filling in the long-winded electronic form took two hours – where ticking the boxes on the old paper forms would take only minutes, so long as you had the necessary figures ready.

Alternatively you can always buy commercial software – all for the privilege of helping the Revenue tax us.

The British tax system is now so complex that even the tax men do not understand it.

We always suspected it, but it is now official. HM Revenue and Customs has miscalculated the tax paid by almost six million people – about 10% of the population of the UK.

UK Treasury Building, London

It is difficult to say which is the more disgraceful: is it the fact that 4,300,000 have been forced to pay the government more than was due; or is it the fact that another 1,400,000 who assumed in good faith they had settled with the tax man for the year will suddenly face additional demands for money?

The average additional demand will be for £1,500 (about $2,250) – quite a lot of money for most people, especially those on a fixed budget in difficult times.

Viewed objectively, the most disgraceful aspect of all in this particular case is that most victims are indeed on a fixed budget, because it relates to PAYE, “Pay As You Earn”, the income tax levied on employees, who are usually on fixed salaries.

Viewed more subjectively, since PAYE is designed as a tax on employees, this particular blunder is less likely to impact directly on most entrepreneurs. However, it does beg an important question: if the tax man can make such a gigantic error in the relatively simple calculation of the taxes on fixed incomes, how many more mistakes are being made in the far more complicated calculation of taxes on entrepreneurs?

Most of us have our horror stories. Some are due to straightforward bureaucratic incompetence, but – to be fair even to the tax man – in many cases it is unfair to blame a poorly educated bureaucrat for failing to understand a system so complex that it baffles some of the sharpest minds in the land.

Everyone agrees that the system is bad, but every attempt at reform has made it more complex and therefore worse. The only solution is to junk the whole thing and start again – with a Flat Rate Tax. Some consider Flat Rate Taxes inegalitarian and therefore “unfair”. Perhaps – but surely not as unfair as a system that overcharges some, springs sudden additional demands on others, and has just been particularly hard on some of our poorest fellow subjects.

Moreover, here is a tax calculation everyone can understand:

Simple = Fair
Fair = Efficient