One of my two employers (the County Council in fact) has deducted too little tax in the tax year ending April 2012, this has come to light as a result of filling in the online self assessment for my small amount of self-employment. Is the employer liable or am I? If I am is there any way I can request to spread the cost of the tax bill? At the moment my tax bill from online self assessment to be paid by 31st Jan is in excess of £1000, I was expecting a bill of around £200 with respect of the self employed work that I do. I am a relatively small earner (around £20K in total) and this amount is impossible for me to pay. Having examined my P60s I can now see that the tax code I was under for my County Council employment 247T does not tally with my gross pay and tax (11313.68 gross pay and 933.40 tax). Any advice will be gratefully received.
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If the employer ...
... was using the code given to them by HMRC it is down to you, you should have checked your coding notices and advised HMRC of adjustments needed.
If the employer failed to use a code sent to them it will be down to them, or for them to explain why they didn't use it.
I believe the coding notices were correct as for my other employment the coding notice was 500L. I think that the coding notice may have changed during the tax year due to me starting a second job but prior to and after this change the tax code was correct for my circumstances . However, it seems that the County Council seem to have neither paid the tax to fit the tax code nor raised an issue with me or the tax office.
Month 1?
Was the PAYE code to which you are referring issued on a week 1 / month 1 basis? If it was then you cannot check whether it was being operated correctly by the employer simply by looking at the year end figures from your P60.
David
It is not ...
... the councils place to raise queries, they have too many employees to worry if they have the correct tax code, that is your responsibility.
What may have happened is that if the code drops during the tax year you will go on a month 1 basis, so they will not collect under paid tax from prior to the change, only going forward. Often HMRC will code this out going forward, unless it is too big - is there an adjustment for this on your 2012/13 coding notice?
If the council have correctly applied the tax code they were told by HMRC it is not their problem. I have noticed that it is not often clear on an employees coding that a month 1 basis has been applied, you will need to read the notes on the back carefully.
EDIT
Ah, David, great minds, you just type faster :o)
Deadline?
... the councils place to raise queries, they have too many employees to worry if they have the correct tax code, that is your responsibility.
What may have happened is that if the code drops during the tax year you will go on a month 1 basis, so they will not collect under paid tax from prior to the change, only going forward. Often HMRC will code this out going forward, unless it is too big - is there an adjustment for this on your 2012/13 coding notice?
If the council have correctly applied the tax code they were told by HMRC it is not their problem. I have noticed that it is not often clear on an employees coding that a month 1 basis has been applied, you will need to read the notes on the back carefully.
EDIT
Ah, David, great minds, you just type faster :o)
I thought if you wanted it coded out the return had to be submitted by 31 December
Check 12/13
also check your current codes. What is each employer using and does this tally with any notices of coding from HMRC? If not contact both employer and HMRC.
It is as stated above up to you to check your codes and that employer is applying any changes.
HMRC should agree to let you pay off the money over 12 months if you ring their self assessment payment helpline or whatever it is currently called now.
If you did not have the self-employment the underpayment would have been coded in for 13/14 so you would have been paying it off then anyway.
Thank you. It looks as if it
Thank you. It looks as if it hasn't been coded out in this tax year but I am happy to pay the tax owed, I just was concerned it had to be within the next 7 days. I will certainly ring the helpline on Monday.
Is they not a place when filing your self assessment you can collect money owes to them through ur tax code?
There is..
Is they not a place when filing your self assessment you can collect money owes to them through ur tax code?
But the deadline was 31 December if you wanted this
Actually 30 December
Is they not a place when filing your self assessment you can collect money owes to them through ur tax code?But the deadline was 31 December if you wanted this
But whatever, that's gone
Why 30 Dec?
As an aside, that deadline has always fascinated me. Why 30/12? In truth, the Revenue's computers shouldn't have a problem with 31 Jan. The only drawback is that they try to do their main recoding exercise for the next Tax year in January. But since there is no human being involved in coding out an underpayment on an SA return, I can;t see why this can't be done.
However why the 30th and not the 31st Dec? Or do they start recoding on New Year's Eve?
I phoned the self assessment helpline this morning. It transpires that in January 2012 my tax code was split and one of my two employers was applying the code on a Week 1/Month 1 basis whilst the other wasn't. I asked HMRC if they had issued the codes that my employer had used and as stated on my P60 and they said 'yes', so it appears that it was their error (not my employers as I had originally suspected). I asked about splitting the cost of the bill over month (or having it coded out next year) but was told I would need to wait 72 hours before we could discuss this.
Not their fault
The Revenue aren't wrong in splitting the tax code, it's a perfectly sane thing to do for people who have two separate sources of income. What they are guilty of is failure to explain when they did this that the overall effect would be to mean you paid less tax than you should through the year. There might have been something about this on the coding notices they issued to you to as 500L and 244T. But it's rarely written in intelligible English.
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought that if the revenue had issued both tax codes on a week 1 / month 1 basis then this shortfall on payment of tax would not have happened?