LONDON BRIEFING:MOVE OVER "Fred the Shred", there's a new hate figure in town. Dave Hartnett, the permanent secretary for tax at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), has leapt to the top of Britain's "most loathed" league after

1.4 million people were landed with unexpected tax demands totalling £2 billion (€2.39 billion).

Millions of taxpayers have been given the wrong tax codes by the revenue, which means they either paid too much or too little tax each month. Now, having discovered the blunder after the installation of a new computer system, HMRC is keen to balance the books.

Calls for the debts to be written off as they were incurred through no fault of the taxpayer were rejected as impossible, given the state of the nation’s finances.

Anyone owing less than £2,000 will see the cash deducted direct from their monthly salary via the PAYE system, and the blow will be softened as payments are spread over a year.

However, those who owe more than £2,000 will face a single demand, which they are expected to meet within three months.

Blunders by the taxman never go down well, but the inept handling of the fiasco by HMRC – and Hartnett in particular – has fuelled the anger of those affected. Just like the banks, HMRC initially seemed unable to own up to the scale of the problem, or to accept any responsibility.

The assumption that anyone facing a demand of more than £2,000 would be wealthy enough to repay the cash immediately has caused widespread anger, much of it directed at Hartnett, who is one of Whitehall’s highest-paid mandarins. At £165,000 a year, his salary is higher than that of the prime minister, and he also has the dubious distinction of having enjoyed more free entertainment than any other Whitehall civil servant.

Over the past three years, according to results of Freedom of Information requests, he has accepted 107 invitations to meals and drinks at venues ranging from the Park Lane Hilton to the Savoy, and meals abroad, in Washington, New York and Sydney.

Like “Fred the Shred” (Sir Fred Goodwin, the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland), Hartnett was given the full tabloid treatment, with reporters and photographers despatched to his £800,000 house “in one of St Albans’s leafier streets”, according to one paper, where three cars were spotted in the drive – a Mercedes convertible, a Mercedes saloon and a new Volkswagen.

The row intensified last weekend when Hartnett, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, refused to apologise for the debacle.

“I’m not sure I see a need to apologise,” he said. By the end of the day, he was forced into an apology so grovelling it would have made a banker blush.

He was, in fact, “deeply sorry”.

Despite the apology, Hartnett’s government masters have been rather lukewarm in their support for Britain’s tax-collector-in-chief in recent days, fuelling speculation that Hartnett will pay for the debacle with his job. He will also undergo trial by Treasury Select Committee, with MPs today grilling him at Westminster to explain how it all happened.

But it’s time that the government, too, took its share of responsibility for the ineptitude of the nation’s creaking tax-collection system.

The warning signs at HMRC have been there for some time. In a scathing report six months ago, the Whitehall department was roundly criticised for its inefficiency, lack of transparency and apparent absence of commitment to the task in hand – namely, collecting taxes for the government.

The report was particularly critical of senior management, but said staff throughout the ranks were disaffected, inefficient and downright rude.

Complaints from members of the public had soared to record levels.

Worse still, the report noted, there appeared to be no plans in hand to address the problems.

It all adds up to a huge amount of lost revenue – over the last five years, HMRC has written off more than £40 billion that should have been collected in tax, a sum equivalent to four times the home office’s annual budget.

These provisions for bad and doubtful debts have soared since 2005, when the department was created through the merger of the Inland Revenue with HM Customs and Excise.

The inability of HMRC to collect past taxes calls into question how much of the current £2 billion sought they will manage to get their hands on.

Meanwhile, to many taxpayers, Hartnett is something of a hero. While 1.4 million face repaying tax to HMRC, more than four million others were overcharged. They will instead be receiving rebates – just in time for Christmas.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London