new cleint has State pension and five others
submitted his 2009 return himself in June 2008
received letter late February stating £3600 was due (this seems in order as insufficient tax deducted from pension payments) and if he did not pay by this Monday action would be taken
client is elderly and quite distyraught, he has funds to pay but is bewildered as to why it has taken so long to deal with and why such agressuve action taken
plan of action advice please
Replies (6)
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Clarify
Is the letter about his SA return or does it follow from the current PAYE trawl HMRC is undertaking?
Has he got P800 tax calculation? Is it correct? Is the client in effect being asked to pay twice?
Have you checked the SA return against the info the client has?
Have you considered whether the underpayment is due solely to the state pension not being coded correctly? In which case could you try and claim the benefit of the Ministerial statement on 11 Jan 2011 about ESCA19 and state pension even if in SA?
Complain - LOUDLY
Is this the first letter he has had requesting this money ?
If so, and if it is indeed aggressive in tone then that is unacceptable - file an immediate formal complaint, wait for the standard fobbing-off letter back from them, then write for the personal attention of the Chairman of HMRC AND copy your letter to the clients MP.
I would also suggest in the complaint that you believe your client, in view of his age and the didtress caused by this letter, would have a good case for claiming compensation for distress.
We have a duty not to allow HMRC to bully taxpayers, and to not allow them to fob-off complaints with their usual meaningless pile of plattitudes which they routinely respond with to complaints.
ESC A19
If your client received his P800 on a Friday then it is probably from the latest trawl through the failure by HMRC to action matters properly.
In that event you might want to look at the following link
http://www.taxadvicenetwork.co.uk/content.asp?PageID=141&ArticleID=668&ma=1&topid=8 and consider whether you should be going on the attack instead of letting them bully your old frail client
Hope that this helps
Check the dates
HMRC have (I understand) written off liabilities which relate to the failure to code out state pension from 2008/09 and earlier years under ESC A19. I thought that this had happened automatically. So any element relating to that would be covered by ESC A19 in any event. Then you need to check that the other pensions have been in payment for long enough to use ESC A19. I have found that the dedicated agent phone staff are very switched on to this and pretty good. One did have to refer to a more technical person one one of my calls but was extremely helpful and we made progress during a single call with no need to call back.