The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 23, 2011

Official News page 4


REAL LIFE NEWS: MR DUMMY'S TAX FORM

by Hazed

In my last job, I was in charge of the database for a college. It contained the details of all our students - name, address, and other personal details of course, but also the courses they were studying.

 

In order to safely test things, I had set up a fake student on the system, called Dummy Dummy. I'd set his address as my own. I made sure that nothing about his record was set so that it was included in anything important, and when I tested anything - for example by enrolling him onto a course - I deleted the data as soon as I had finished the tests.

 

Even so, on one occasion somebody took an export of data from the database in order to do a mailout, at the same time I was playing with my dummy record, and a few days later a letter arrived at my house addressed to Mr Dummy Dummy!

 

It seems I am not the only one to use Dummy as a fake name. A report by the UK tax service (HMRC) says that employers often send in tax forms with the wrong data on them, and common mistakes include incorrect surnames. Many of these appear to be placeholders used when the person filling in the details doesn't have the correct info.

 

In the 2009/10 tax year, there were 820 people with the surname Unknown, and 500 people called A N Other. 128 were Mr or Mrs Dummy, and 572 had various surnames consisting of one or more Xs.

 

It wasn't just placeholder names that caused problems: about 100 staff were named according to their job title, implying that the people filling in the forms had misunderstood them. There were 75 people called Casual, 11 Cleaners, nine Workers and six Students.

 

(Mind you, back at the college, we did have a student whose surname was Auditor...)

 

Dates of birth were also prone to error, with about 40 people shown as being at least 200 years old.

 

These entertaining facts have been released by the taxman in an attempt to get companies to take more care when filling in paperwork. Will it work? Probably not. I am sure those using placeholders meant to go back and correct them later, but...

 

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/18/hmrc_paye_reporting/


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