This is taken from The Times, June 7 2009:

The joys of coming clean to the taxman
Former BBC journalist found unexpected benefits in kind when he admitted fiddling his expenses
by Graham Turner

The taxman’s face went white. He seemed at a loss for words. After a long, uncomfortable pause, he stammered: “We have no procedure for this.” He had seemed pleased to see me when I arrived. At the time, I was the BBC’s economics correspondent, and he may have thought I had come to ask for his advice. So when I confessed instead that I had been fiddling my taxes by understating my freelance earnings, he was totally thrown.

He soon regained his equilibrium, however. “You are, of course,” he said, almost apologetically, “guilty of fraud.”
I was shocked by the word. I had never thought of myself as a fraudster, but I could hardly deny it. “We’ll need to see your tax returns for the past five years,” he added.

Driving home, I could not help thinking: “I’m being a good boy, so why do I feel so miserable?” Back came the answer, in my head: “Because you have to pay.”

I had gone to the Inland Revenue in Aylesbury, driven by an irresistible sense that it was high time to put my life in order. I was not doing well with our children; my temper was — at best — uncertain. I was fed up with myself. My wife had been delighted that I had decided to sort myself out but had never cared for the idea of me coming clean to the taxman. “You will go to prison,” she said. For once, I ignored her.

My second visit to the taxman was an altogether happier affair. Everyone in the building seemed to know what I was doing. People I’d never seen before wished me the heartiest of good mornings. Having looked into my affairs, they had calculated that I needed to repay £1,000 — a considerable slice of my salary in 1970 — plus a nominal fine of £50. So, not a life behind bars, after all, but it did take care of half our savings.

That was not the end of the story, because I had also been fiddling my expenses at the BBC. Week after week I had blithely claimed for events that had never taken place: lunches with senior officials at the Treasury, drinks with top businessmen and so on — probably another £1,000 over the years.

As I had already left the BBC to go freelance by then, I wrote to Sir Charles Curran, the director-general at the time, telling him I wanted to pay the money back. When we met, he was genial and understanding, though perhaps a little embarrassed.

“Now look, Graham,” he said, “we always thought that we underpaid you, so why not take the £1,000 as a kind of retrospective bonus?”

Tempting, but it did not feel right, so I said: “Charles, I can’t do that.”

“Very well,” he replied. “The money will go into the war memorial fund.” That cleaned out the rest of our savings.

I began to feel a lightness of spirit that I had never expected, even though it had been a painful process. There were other bonuses, too. I thought that one of our three little children was, at seven, old enough to understand, so I told him about my visits to the taxman and the BBC.

“Well,” he said loftily, “if you’d been honest in the first place, you wouldn’t be in trouble now!”

One morning some weeks later he came downstairs looking thoroughly miserable. I asked what was wrong but it was some time before he came out with it. “I have been stealing sweets from Mr Gotelier’s shop,” he said.

“And what do you think you should do about it?” I asked.

“I think I should give him all my money,” he replied.

“How much have you got?” I asked.

“Thirty pence,” he said.

So, on his way to school, he went into the sweetshop and handed over his 30p. Mr Gotelier did not want to take the money but my son insisted.

There was more. In the autumn of that year, to my astonishment, I won a prize for a book I had written about British Leyland. The prize money was £2,000.

This may all seem a long time ago but the expenses scandal that has engulfed parliament has brought it back to me. Thinking about my dishonesty, I have wondered whether all the people who have been castigating MPs for their dodgy expenses claims are themselves as honest as they expect the honourable members to be.

The other day I was talking with some acquaintances about what they wanted to come out of the scandal. “Oh,” said one, “I’d like to see much greater openness and transparency.” He then, quite seamlessly and with not the least sense of shame, proceeded to tell me about what he described as his own little fiddle. I said nothing. Having spent my time at the BBC publicly pontificating on what should happen to the nation’s economy while privately fiddling my taxes and expenses, I know all about bogus self-righteousness.

Have we, in a world where taxes can seem unfair and where some people appear to be able to earn vast amounts of money with remarkably little effort, slipped into a culture of taking whatever we can get away with? That, surely, is what has gone wrong in parliament. And it may not be only MPs who have things that need to be put right.