You have one of those days. It's the middle of the week. You're late leaving the office. You're not in a good mood.You've already decided you just have to stop and get a bottle of wine. As you know there's nothing in the fridge, you bundle everything into one stop. Your shopping basket fills with one bottle of Anubis, a 3 pack of Magnums, 2 pain aux raisons, and for dinner?

There you are in the ready made meal aisle. A picture catches your eye: mmmmmm...... Finest Chilli Beef Noodles. The short, mouth watering trip from Tesco's to home is spent thinking about the chilli beef, mmmmmmm, pouring a glass of wine with "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" like they do in "Ode to a Nightingale".

You're there. You switch the oven on, gas mark 5 you presume ....mmmmmmmmmm. You look at the packaging. You look again. You turn the box of Chilli Noodles around, and over again, not believing the innocuous, camouflaged symbol in the bottom left hand corner which says "microwave only". You don't have one. Having grown up in Ireland in the 70's and 80's you've always retained your suspicion of the microwave, and you've just paid £3.69 to be snatched, unceremoniously, from the jaws of your midweek, having a very bad day, escape. 

Opening a business bank account with Alliance & Leicester for a client. The client company had one director and an off the shelf company secretary.

The bank declined to offer a bank account citing its reason as "one or more of the Directors involvement with a liquidated company".

The Director, a millionaire, had closed a company three years earlier and distributed the large surplus the company had amassed as a dividend to himself and the other shareholders.

Naturally an off the shelf company secretary will be involved in liquidated companies as so many new companies fail in their first year.

Although, I did appeal the decision based on the facts and had the account opened it does prompt the question why

1. a bank would apply a screening technique based on involvement with a liquidated company
2. without understanding the nature or scale of the liquidation (was it a corner shop or Enron?).
3. When the Director is clearly not disqualified from acting as a company Director and 
4. even had he been involved in a compulsory liquidation, why, he should be refused a bank account because he was involved in a failed business.
5. If the business only needs a current account with no overdraft or lending facilities where is the risk for the bank?

You would think if someone picked themselves up from business failure to try again they would be encouraged, rather than having institutional doors shut as if they carried a communicable disease. Do the life coaches not continually remind us of Edison and the light bulb?

At least in this case there was a happy ending, Alliance & Leicester saw sense. This is more than can be said for HSBC who once declined to open a business account for me because my personal bank branch was in East London, I lived in Surrey and I hadn't changed the address on my Driving licence. It all added up to suspicion. This is why I always dissuade clients from using HSBC. I will always recommend an alternative bank, like Alliance & Leicester or Barclays.

For those who don't know, dmoz, or the "Open Directory Project" is the "largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of  the web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors."

The DMOZ database feeds search engines like Google, AOL, and Lycos. This is one of the reasons web developers will endeavour to have their sites included in there.

Oddly, the fact that all submitted content is human reviewed, is broadcast as a major quality control advantage. The volunteers or "net citizens" as they are called, can cull "out the bad and useless......keeping only the best content".

There are over 4million sites included in the directory, The directory has over 74,000 editors managing 590,000 categories. Anyone can apply to be an editor. You pick a category and then soon you too can keep out "the bad and useless".

If you ever have the patience to browse through the dmoz directory you might be surprised by some of the included sites. At various stages I've found holding pages, pages only made to click through to sales, pages without any useful content, pages that are badly made or inaccessible. These are clearly not "the best content" and their inclusion in the directory would seem to add credibility to tales of corruption among the editors.

There are stories that the editors can be bribed, stories they will deliberately sabotage competitors sites either by changing their classifications or not adding them at all to the directory. The dmoz directory aims "to become the definitive catalog of the web".

We are not living in some future world where corruption and greed have been erased from humanity; the ego has not been subdued and we do not live together in an open, intelligent and selfless society. Can a human edited database (which has to inherently include all the subjectivity, bias and preferences of the editors) therefore produce objective results, can it be relied on to keep only "the best content"?

Well done for trying but I think I would feel safer in the hands of an algorithm.

I had a virtual server with a UK, aim listed, hosting company (I'll blog about them separately). One day I receive a sales call. The sales person advises me that the company is discontinuing its virtual server range and I would have to upgrade to a dedicated server. 

I was paying £39 per month for a virtual box. The upgrade was only going to cost me an extra £20 per month so I went ahead. There wasn't an alternative.

As I had a lot of domains on the virtual box (free hosting to startups) I had concerns about the time it would take to migrate. But "ah" they said the Plesk Control Panel is included in the Gold package. That will ease the migration.

Little did I know that there was a limit of 10 domains on the box. If I wanted to add more I would have to buy additional licences from Plesk. So the solution was completely unsuitable for me. Why would I pay more to host some sites which have no database backend and use up about 50K of disk space?

Aside from that, Plesk proved to be a completely useless interface for configuring and administering the server. It was't able to adequately configure other applications running on the box like MySQL, PHP and the Apache web server.

Unless all you want to do is administer some emails and domains and you are prepared to pay the licence costs invest in Plesk. If you actually want to control your box don't, just install Webmin. Webmin is free and gives you control over the whole box.

I eventually installed Webmin on the dedicated server but Plesk wasn't going to give up. It had damaged the configuration too much. The only solution would have been to start with a new box, no plesk installation. A dedicated server, without the Plesk control panel, was £49.99, so I thought that was good I save £10 per month. High five, and buy a bottle of wine.

But support tell me a different story to sales. If I pay £49.99 I won't have a MySQL database. So tell me what good is an 80Gb box without a database? At the moment I am migrating my business away to another company, and the cost of the dedicated server package I had has been increased by over 16%.

So that was a good technique, ring your clients and tell them you're discontinuing a product they're using. Switch them over to a more expensive product (50% more expensive). Wait awhile, then up the price of the more expensive product even further. Result: you almost double sales.

The board or the VC's must be getting ready for an exit!

Being completely anti Apple I don't know why I downloaded iTunes. Well, yes I do, it was recommended to me.

At first it was a love affair. Finally I was able to get my hands on the U2 cover versions of Endless Love and Unchained Melody, but that was about it.

Soon I began to appreciate the iTunes library didn't contain much of the songs I was looking for (like Waterloo Sunset and Eve of Destruction) or almost worse, all it would have is a crumby live version.  However, I persisted. I downloaded Bobby Sinclairs Love Generation as it reminded me of taking a bus ride over the Andes. I downloaded about nine songs in all, and now they're completely stuck in my computer.

I don't have an iPod. I will never buy an iPod. If I were to receive one as a gift i would put it straight on eBay. When I'm in the car and not listening to LBC 97.3 I like to listen to my CD's but of course these ridiculous m4p files from Apple won't let me that.

The only solution it would seem is to use a crack program to convert them into something useable, something that I can listen to, i did buy them after all. Had i known the limitations I would have concluded the unit price per song was actually too much.

Note to self: next time buy the CD

Once you’ve purchased Norton Anti Virus Software you’re unwittingly locked into a cage. Your machine is secure and you learn to live with the degradation in speed and performance but watch out if you decide to not renew your subscription. Getting out of the cage is difficult. Alerts dominate your screen telling you the obvious. Even if you click them they do not go away, they will reappear, like a virus, on the screen in one minute, like this one below.

If you untick the box above and click ok the alert will only disappear for one minute.

The best you can do is try to drag the box away off screen, but it doesn’t work for long. Wake your machine up from one of its forty screen saver winks and the Norton alert message has made a Hollywood reappearance, dominating your screen again.

The marketers have must have carefully devised this to be so annoying that the majority of users will end up opening Norton and renewing their subscription. As I completely detest hard sales and lack of choice my only option to escape the cage was to uninstall Norton completely and get a proper system from Kaspersky Labs.

Go Kaspersky!

Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Pro

I am still astonished that this actually happened, particularly when there are estimated to be over 400,000 illegal immigrants in the UK.

I have a contract with a UK entrepreneur. He has businesses in the UK and Hong Kong and recently looked to acquire an IT Service business in Bangkok.

His UK company invited a Thai national, "Kay", to visit his UK office to discuss a possible employment offer in Bangkok or Hong Kong. Despite an official company invitation a visitors visa was refused, to make matters worse, "Kay" was not even interviewed by the British Embassy in Dublin.

UK Visas claim to "issue visas to 80% of those who apply, and stop only those who are a significant immigration risk to the UK".

Kay was on a two week holiday in Ireland when we contacted her and asked her to make a short visit to us in the UK. She was already in the EC. The Irish Honorary Consul in Bangkok had ascertained her local circumstances and granted a visa to her. In a seeming vote of no confidence in the Irish immigration process the UK Embassy in Dublin would not let her visit London (clearly determining her to be a significant immigration risk).

Despite being invited to the UK by a UK company, despite having an onward ticket to Bangkok, despite having a letter of sponsorship from an accountant living in Surrey, despite already being in the EC, despite being granted a visitors visa to Ireland Kay, an employable young graduate, was refused UK entry clearance.

As a consequence the UK company had to fly a representative to Bangkok to hold the meeting which should  have happened in the UK.

Words like bumbling and ludicrous come to mind. Have you ever had a similar experience?

On the 4th July I applied online for a VAT registration number for a small company. The company, a home business, is estimated to turnover no more than £75K.

In the application the activities of the business were described as "General trade of hardware and previously owned goods to end users and resellers."

The application prompted an enquiry for further information. Bearing in mind the size and scale of the business, the questions from the VAT office included (these were some of the best)

The process of starting a business is being stifled even further by having to wait in excess of three months for a company to be VAT registered. During that time you have to answer queries which can't be regarded as sensible and which could have been avoided with an effective risk based approach, an improved application form and some intelligence applied to the process. Instead, it seems as if every application is being treated as a fraudulent application.

In this example: the small company applies for registration on the 4th July. On the 26th August HMRC write to say it may take an additional 12 weeks, bringing total time taken to almost five months. During that time I have to increase my price to include VAT and tell customers I will sort them out with a tax invoice later. Incredible.

If you are registering a company for VAT in the UK be sure to factor in a considerable amount of idle time while you wait. In the meantime what can you expect? Well, HMRC ask you to add VAT to your sales price and tell your customer you'll sort him out later with a tax invoice.  

Yeah right! If your supplier asked you to do that what would you think? i know what I'd do if I was the customer.

What can possibly take so long? You're not likely to find out. HMRC, a public service body, instructs (their emphasis) "You should not contact either this office or the National Advice Service to see how your application is progressing. As you may appreciate, dealing with constant phone enquiries can further delay the processing time."

This letter, of course, isn't at all consistent with the information on the HMRC website. There in the FAQ's section under "When will I get my VAT registration number?" it says "...it may take up to 8 weeks to complete the registration process as we are now carrying out a wider range of checks on every application." and "We expect to be able to issue you with a VAT registraiton number in about 8 weeks but it may not take this long."

So riddle me this, Riddler: what on earth can take HMRC twenty weeks to process a VAT application which was correctly completed to start with?

The last word
Is it a solution to devise a system of controls, designed to prevent an abuse by a minority, and apply them indiscriminately to everyone? I like the story of the courageous retailer who successfully improved her business model by deciding to focus on selling to the majority rather than preventing theft by a minority. The change in focus, leading to tangible changes to the store layout and removing restrictions like the number of items a shopper could bring into the dressing room, led to strong retail sales growth without an increase in theft.

Even with our Government Think Tanks and the intelligence of many civil servants you would think a better solution could be devised, rather than a fix, which must naturally assume everyone a crook.

It can now take over three months and up to five months to get a VAT registration number from HMRC as they seem unable to apply any form of risk management or triage to the registration process. You have small "rinky dinky" companies being asked to provide business plans and marketing material, and they can be still turned down for registration for not supplying more information; none of which is asked for at the registration stage.

Right now this situation would seem to be permanent. I have two new companies registering for VAT. Company A applied for registration on the 6th June and is still not registered. I received a letter to Company B this morning advising me that it may take another 12 weeks. Company B is registering on a voluntary basis with monthly turnover not expected to exceed £6,000.

However, what I find most disconcerting about this process is HMRC stating on their website:

"Although you cannot charge VAT before you are registered or show VAT as a separate item on any invoices you issue, you can change your prices to include VAT. You can do this from the date you should be registered and before you receive your Certificate of Registration. You will need to explain to your customers that you will be sending them VAT invoices later."

I can change my price to include VAT but can't show it on the invoice, so my customer is unable to reclaim any of this VAT until I later provide him with a VAT invoice. As a customer I would assume my supplier is pulling a fast one, I will never get an invoice. I would certainly not pay over the full amount, and then we are in the wonderful accounting  world of part payments, later followed by credit notes and re-issued invoices.

As a customer, unless I am buying from a personal service company, I wouldn't buy stock from a company which is not registered for VAT, as I wouldn't believe in the substance of it.

Being the sole director of an existing company which is VAT registered and always pays its VAT on time means nothing to HMRC if you wish to start another company. They will approach your application as though your intent is to fraudulently register for VAT. The fact you might be a home owner in the UK, be the member of a professional body, have previously worked in government, pay your VAT on time are not considered as no risk assessment is applied. Is this the best use of tax payers money? Surely there is something fundamentally wrong with the registration process.