May 29, 2026
Nil returns, full chaos
The UK Government's Low Value Purchase System Is a Waste of Time
Thousands of small firms are logging in just to say ‘nope’ — and commenters are losing it
TLDR: A UK government supplier system has over 96% of businesses logging in each month just to report they sold nothing, wasting days of collective time. Commenters are split between furious and sarcastic, with many saying the fix is obvious and the whole process is classic bureaucratic nonsense.
The internet has found its latest tiny-bureaucracy villain: a UK government buying system where more than 96% of suppliers each month sign in only to report they did absolutely no business. That means well over a thousand small businesses are apparently burning time on passwords, multi-step logins, and a glorified “nothing happened” button. The original complaint was already spicy — if only a few dozen firms actually sold anything, why are everyone else doing monthly admin homework at all? — but the comments turned it into a full-on roast.
The loudest mood was simple: this is pointless busywork. One commenter said government staff need real incentives, not distant accountability like elections, while another offered the brutally obvious fix: just let people suspend their account after a nil return and only come back when they actually make a sale. Others piled on with horror stories of their own, including one person recalling years of threatening tax letters because there was no proper way to say “we sold nothing.” Suddenly this wasn’t just one quirky British form — it was a support group for everyone ever trapped in paperwork limbo.
And then came the snark. One commenter deadpanned that maybe the real waste of time was all of us reading about it, which is exactly the kind of joke that makes a thread like this zing. Another jab landed when the government sent data in a PDF after being asked for a machine-readable file, prompting side-eye over whether “machine-readable” just means “not printed on paper.” In other words: the form is annoying, the reporting is absurd, and the comments are having a field day.
Key Points
- •The article says suppliers on the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System must file a monthly return even when they have made no sales through the system.
- •According to figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request, 96.1% to 97.4% of monthly submissions from April 2025 to February 2026 were 'no business' returns.
- •The article states that monthly total submissions ranged from 902 to 1,713 over the reported period.
- •Using an estimate of two minutes per submission, the article says nil-return reporting consumes more than two days of supplier time each month.
- •The author says a separate Freedom of Information request found that feedback results are anonymised and not held specifically for RM6237.