Didn't notify tax credits of change within 30 days

lil_lisa

I was wondering if anyone could help?

My husband started a new job on the 6th of September. I held off for a few weeks contacting tax credits as I wanted to be able to be able to give them accurate figures since bonuses/shift allowances come into play in his play slip quite a bit. Now we've had a few weeks payslips on various shift patterns we have a pretty accurate figure we can give them for the rest of this tax year.

Planned to call them last week with all the details but completely forgot (kicking myself now) and tried to ring today but their computers are now down until next Tues. So we're now (just) out of that 30 day window.

I realised that this could result in an overpayment (although possibly not as we'd given speculative figures for this year when renewing which I believe are close to the actual figures) so any payments since my husband started work have been put to the side.

Am I likely to recieve any sort of penalty because of this? Can't tell you how annoyed I am at myself for this!

RAS

Write to them telling them when you called and then you will had proof that you tried to report it within 30 days.

System

Has his income risen or gone down.
If it has risen and you haven't already given TCO a revised estimated income since you did your annual declaration then unless you think his income is going to rise by more than £25000 you have nothing to worry about.

If you have already given them a revised estimated income for 10/11 then yes you may have an overpayment but there is still 5 months of the tax year left for them to reduce your payments and the likelyhood of the overpayment being large.

However for changes in employment you have 3 months to report the change - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/taxcredits/keep-up-to-date/changes-affect/how-when-report.htm