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But but but... HMRC couldn't successfully program the tax calculations for 2016-17 so how can they hope to deal with this - unless they have learnt from experience!
Presume the " Scottish" tick flag on the tax return and S coding prefix on your tax code does the necessary, moves you to a different set of calculation tables; now whether it works!!
Rebecca, can you please confirm my understanding that rental income received by Scottish taxpayers is subject to Scottish income tax - ie treated as non savings income? In which case do we yet know what rate will be used to calculate the basic rate tax reduction for disallowed mortgage interest?
The rounding up of the marriage allowance to £1,190 is a direct consequence of the indexing provisions applied to tax allowances, to £10 and tax rate bands to £100. (something that the Scots seem to have forgotten with their bodged rate bands - £43,430 is what the basic rate threshold would have been for the previous year, 2017/18 before the Greens insisted on it being frozen in absolute terms, the original Scottish proposal was a threshold of £44,273!)
A further issue is defining who is a Scottish taxpayer for this purpose - HMRC are concentrating on postal addresses and asking employers to get them updated but according to the legislation it is the place of a taxpayers main residence in fact - and as a further twist, if that changes during the year there is no split year treatment - so a taxpayer moving main residence from scotland to England in June will NOT be a Scottish taxpayer - although probably his coding as an employee will indicate that he is, and moving to England in November will be a Scottish taxpayer until the following April 5th - lot's of fun for the tribunal service in the future. I haven't looked at this in detail yet but I got the impression that the definition of a Welsh taxpayer, which becomes significant from April 2019 onwards, is not the same as the definition of a Scottish taxpayer - can this be so?
I deal with contractors working in oil and gas and have clients with their home in Scotland but working in RUK and living in rented accommodation Monday to Friday or conversely home in RUK and renting and working in Scotland so I've been following the residence debate. In these sorts of circumstances it seems to have firmed up on where are your family, doctor, golf club etc located rather like the tie breaker tests used in normal dual residence.
I agree that people who move their main residence part way through the year may give scope for argument, will that come down to day counting? and if so does it make the planning of overseas holidays crucial for people moving mid tax year so they reduce the days physically spent in the higher tax jurisdiction to tip the balance.
This is the official guidance in it's most recent form and indeed day counting is part of the process - https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/scottish-taxpayer-technical-gui... - as it goes on to point out there is no legal definition of residence (well there is for the statutory residence test but this predates it and is independent of it in all circumstances save one - you must be UK resident in the first place to be a Scottish taxpayer) - I am sure that people like your contractors will give difficulty!