Advised pensioner client to ask wife to go online and make HMRC claim to transfer marriage allowance to him. Aging client said he was well up to doing stuff online!!!
After client's wife received "HMRC" letter with "HMRC" form to sign, I asked client to ensure claim form was signed correctly before he sent it on to HMRC.
AT VIRTUALLY THE LAST SECOND I asked client to send the completed marriage allowance claim form to me to check......just in case.
Glad I did so. The "HMRC" claims form was in fact from a Marriage Allowance Claims company. The signed form LEGALLY ASSIGNS the tax repayment to the claims company. A check on the Internet reveals that the claims company charges 50% of the tax repayment for the privilege of making what is the most simple of claims.
Client is oblivious to what he almost did. And maybe I would have been 1% responsible.
I really should have filled in form 575 myself. Think I will do that now. (Sorry, wrong form - see my correction to form 575 below).
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Just noticed my error. Form 575 appears to relate only to the transfer of:
a) Married Couple's Allowance for those born before 6 April 1935, and
b) Blind Person's Allowance.
So far, I have been unable to find any form to claim Marriage Allowance. The only other alternative I can find so far is to phone the HMRC Marriage Allowance phone number on
0300 200 3300
Letter.
The process is very simple, but remind them that it can be backdated too. So she can claim not just for the current year but also for previous years and must say yes to that as she goes through on the screen.
I got the clients to telephone HMRC, having provided them with a script and having told them what information to have ready. Worked very well.
There's a LOT of this about.
There's a non-trivial fraction of the victims who refuse to accept that they've been conned, too !
Those who have been conned need to get in touch with HMRC asap - as the letter they sign usually gives the agent powers over more than just MAT claims.
Do it online
The problem with that is that, quite often, the agent only acts for one party to the marriage. More often than not, the wrong one.
A few years back I had a colleague ask me about his tax return. He:
- searched for HMRC tax returns in Google,
- picked the first link (believing it to be for HMRC),
- filled in income details and submitted his return
- paid what he believed to be the liability as shown by the site; and
- was then surprised to receive demands from HMRC 'because he had already paid the liability'
Turned out the link he had chosen was for an Online TR completion firm whose site used similar colours & fonts, and the 'tax' he had paid was actually their fee.
This was a few years back and Google were supposed to have changed the way that such sites appeared in search results so that GOV.UK appeared first and not the money grabbers
The Gov.Uk site is top of the search I did...but 4 down as paid adverts get in the way. It is Google's paid adverts that seem to to be the problem here.
The daughter of a client of mine fell for a similar thing for a simple fixed expenses allowance claim.
By appointing the firm and mandating the refund to them the authority for all future repayments perhaps in which they have had no involvement stays in place until it is revoked.
This all seems like a lot of faff. Are you charging 50% of the refund as your fee to compensate for your time :) :)