Eamonn Holmes has said his case with HMRC was a "humiliating experience".
The Belfast man said in 2018, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs 'wanted 10 years of backdated national insurance' as they said his former jobs "were staff jobs rather than self-employed".
Around the same time, the TV presenter suffered from shingles - two weeks before his eldest son Declan's wedding.
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Speaking to The Guardian, Eamonn said: "Sleep deprivation is difficult. But it wasn’t the stress from the early morning broadcasts that triggered my shingles. I believe mine to have been related to HMRC.
"In 2018, they came knocking at my door, claiming my former jobs at Sky News, GMTV, Channel 5 and This Morning were staff jobs rather than self-employed. They wanted 10 years’ backdated national insurance. To go back a decade to try and get the money that you’ve already spent? I don’t care how much you earn, you spend it. It was gone.
"I take paying taxes very seriously, but when something like this happens, people see you as some kind of tax dodger, and it was a humiliating experience. They spent a fortune to make sure they weren’t going to lose the court case, which they didn’t. Two weeks later it was my son’s wedding and I came out in all these shingles.
"My face, neck and body were covered in massive blisters. It was awful for my son and for the wedding pictures – I tried to get makeup to cover my face, but I looked like Quasimodo. TV is a visual medium, so obviously I couldn’t work for weeks afterwards as I had open sores on my face. It was horrendous."
In the same interview, Eamonn said being a journalist was 'all he wanted' by the age of 11.
He told The Guardian: "Everybody thought it was ridiculous and all a bit pie in the sky: why don’t you want to be a lawyer or a doctor? My mother didn’t want me to do it at all – she thought I should just get a real job. If I was the assistant manager in the local Co-op, that would be the height of her dreams. But I loved it right from the start because it never felt like work to me.
"Growing up in Belfast during the Troubles informed how I thought about the world. It gave me a natural curiosity and shaped how I understood global conflicts. Belfast was just like Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle – yet we could have been killed just for an accident of birth, for our religion."
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