The UK tax authority has discovered that roughly one million people—mostly women—have been overcharged on pension tax relief. The solution? Send them £70. The catch? HMRC has not yet ruled out charging them £75 to process the refund.
This is, technically, generous. One million people receiving money back from the government is the kind of headline that makes HMRC’s communications team break out the champagne. But here is where the comedy lives: the moment HMRC announces a refund, you can practically hear the accountants in their regional offices rubbing their hands together, already designing the administrative fee structure that will make the original overpayment look like a bargain.
The letter itself comes with the reassurance that this is “not a scam.” Which is exactly what a scam would say. Not because HMRC is running one—they are not—but because the refund process has become so Byzantine that people now need official confirmation that they are not being fleeced. That is the bar we have set for institutional trust in 2026: “Please believe us, we are giving you money back and we are not immediately taking it again.”
For context: £70 is roughly the cost of a decent dinner for two, or what you might spend on groceries in a week if you are being careful. It is not transformative. It is the kind of refund that says “we messed up, but not so badly that we feel compelled to actually apologize properly.” It is a financial equivalent of “sorry you had to experience that.”
The real absurdity is not the refund itself. It is that we live in a world where a government body returning money it took in error feels like a plot twist.