Client, receiving refunds of £1k or so per year, has now been advised that SATRs will not be issued in future. But SATR's, unlike R40's, can be filed electronically with benefit of immediate refund.
Does anyone know if R40's are to be filed by internet in future or should we instead request that all R40 cases are brought into SA? (Using 3rd party software should mean no difference in the workload required to complete the form)
I guess the only downside is that R40 clients tend to be elderly and one wouldn't necessarily want to impose otherwise unnecessary penalty deadlines on them. Nevertheless it seems unfair that an SA taxpayer can get an immedate refund whereas an R40 case, who is probably more in need, has to wait.
David Lochhead
Replies (4)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Not so much an urban myth, Clint...
... more an attempt to draw reasonable conclusions from an unreasonable fact pattern!
Problem is, the legislation is deficient. It is written on the tacit understanding that nobody would ever voluntarily enter the SA world.
Accordingly, we have s.7 which says that you must notify chargeability if you owe tax and HMRC doesn't serve a return notice; and we have s.8 which prescribes what we must do if HMRC does serve a return notice. The one permutation which isn't mentioned by the legislation is if you don't owe tax but still want to file an SATR.
That's why, if you spontaneously file an SA100, HMRC has to pretend you did it in response to a s.8 notice: otherwise, they would have no legal mandate to process it or even acknowledge its existence!
In practice, therefore, what invariably happens in these cases is that HMRC will accept the SA100 but try its damnedest to persuade you not to send one in the next time. Hence the quasi-urban myth that you can insist on SA: in strict legal terms you can't, but in effect you can...
FBI for repayments
In my experience, if the Inland Revenue has issued a return, but then decided that the client need not complete a return, they will input a nil return onto their system. If you subsequently try to file a return by FBI, it will show as accepted on the government gateway system, but not go through to the district - so refund does not come through. This happened to me last year, when the client in question actually owed £200,000 tax (due to large capital gain in year). He should never have been taken out of SA and I rang them to say so, when I got the notification. It was only when he got his statement and queried why there was no tax showing (return submitted in September)that we discovered the problems with the IR system. I couldn't (and still can't)understand why there wasn't an error report which identified returns that had been accepted at the government gateway, but not gone through to the district. In my previous existence as an auditor, twenty years ago, systems produced exception reports as one method of control.