Eamonn Holmes says the HMRC case was a ‘humiliating experience’ –

Eamonn Holmes said his case with HMRC was a “humiliating experience”.

The Belfast man said in 2018 that Her Majesty’s income and habits “wanted 10 years of National Insurance” because they said his previous jobs were “employee jobs and not self-employment”.

At about the same time, the TV presenter fell ill with an investigation, two weeks before the wedding of his eldest son, Declan.

Speaking to The Guardian, Eamonn said, “Lack of sleep is hard. But it wasn’t the stress of my morning schedule that caused my investigation. I think mine was related to HMRC.”

“In 2018, they knocked on my door and said my previous job at Sky News, GMTV, Channel 5 and This Morning was personal business, not self-employment. They wanted 10 years of reversible National Insurance. Going back a decade. Are you trying to get money? What have you already spent? I don’t care how much you earn, you spend, it’s gone.

“I take taxes very seriously, but when something like that happens, people look at you as a tax evader and it was a humbling experience. They spent a lot of money making sure they didn’t lose the case. What they didn’t. Two weeks later, it was a party. My son’s wedding and I went out with all these sharks.

The face, neck and body were covered with huge blisters. It was awful for my son and the wedding – I tried to put on makeup to cover my face, but I’m like Quasimodo. TV is a visual medium, so obviously I couldn’t work on it for weeks after that, I got sore, it was awful.

In the same interview, Eamonn claimed that journalism was “everything he wanted” at the age of eleven.

He told the Guardian: “Everyone thought it was funny and everything was cake in the sky: Why don’t you want to be a lawyer or a doctor? My mother didn’t want me to do this at all — I thought. He just had to find a real job, a deputy director at A local co-op, it would have been the culmination of his dreams, but I loved it from the start because I never wanted to work.

Growing up in Belfast, he introduced me to the way I think about the world. This gave me a natural curiosity and shaped how I understood global conflicts. Belfast was like Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle, but we could have died in an accident. to give birth to our religion.”