One lady who came in to see her trembled for much of the interview, and she had a visit from an elderly man who had been up all night worrying because he thought his tax code was his bill.However difficult you find it to fill in the self-assessment forms, the advice from the professionals is to complete them and return them to the Inland Revenue by 30 September if you want your tax liability to be calculated by the men from the ministry. Most of them are not, although one lady’s pounds 8,500 gain did push her over the tax threshold.Mrs Hart says that most people keep their tempers when they ring, although one caller did slam down the phone. In fact, only one in three do.Among the worried callers to the tax helpline are people who have sold their building society windfall shares and want to know if they are liable for Capital Gains Tax. But they seem to have been a hindrance rather than a help – especially their recent adverts.Mrs Hart has had a lot of calls from people who have seen the “Hector the Tax Inspector” adverts on television and think that everyone needs to fill in a Self-Assessment tax return.

It’s all right for him, he’s been working on it for the last two years. The rest of us will get used to it eventually, but it doesn’t help when you’re doing your first one with the threat of a big fine hanging over your head,” she added.”Maybe if we charged the Revenue per hour for the time it took us to fill the returns in, they’d start making things a bit easier for us.”The Inland Revenue has tried a variety of ways to get its message across, including persuading soap operas like The Archers, EastEnders and Brookside to mention self-assessment. “They just sit there in their ivory towers and keep sending the notices,” said the campaign’s director, Chrissie Maher. “The people on the receiving end are scared to death.”She is unimpressed by Mr Smith’s boast that it took him just 15 minutes to complete his form “It just makes people feel stupid when he says that. “Thank God not everyone’s like that, or else we wouldn’t get anything done,” she says.The Plain English Campaign says it has had hundreds of complaints from people who find the forms incomprehensible, and more from others who are petrified by them.

The word “penalty” appears three times in the first two pages of the Tax Return Guide, a reference to the automatic fines which will be imposed on forms returned after the final deadline, and on people who set out to “deliberately mislead” the Revenue.The campaign has complained but at the Revenue they are not taking any notice. Some callers need 10 minutes’ help, others need three-quarters of an hour.A couple of people have even brought in bags full of their papers, and Mrs Hart has spent an hour-and-a-half talking them through their return. On top of that, she takes about 20 phone calls from members of the public needing to be coached through filling in their forms. Despite the 2.5 million forms expected by the 30 September deadline, no extra staff have been recruited.Indeed, the original idea, as set out by Norman Lamont in his 1991 budget, aimed to save pounds 75m a year, and achieve 3,000 job cuts by1999. In practice, the Revenue has spent the past three years and pounds 25m preparing the public for self-assessment, and almost as much on training staff and setting up their computer and support systems.Despite this, frontline staff in in local offices are daunted by the prospect of dealing with the self-assessment forms and are constantly bombarded by people calling in to report how flummoxed they are.Janice Hart has to deal with around 30 face-to-face interviews per day in the Taxpayer Enquiry Centre at the Woolwich Taxpayer Service Office in south-east London. Doug Smith, head of the tax assessment operation, says it took only 15 minutes to fill in his form.