I need tax advice please!!!!

jem16

lilacjaffa wrote: »

There is no P46 on file for me ive checked with payrole they said it was issued by the tax office.

So how did they get a tax code issued?

With the absence of a P45 and a P46 code BR should have been used automatically.

lilacjaffa wrote: »

HMRC have said that they had on my file that I had left job 1 when i started job 2 when i didnt. they dont know if this information has come from my employer or a mistake on their part

OK this mess is partly your fault for not making sure you were being taxed correctly. However whether HMRC has also been partly to blame I don't know.

Suggest you contact these people who are offering free help.

http://www.find-me-an-accountant.com/2010/09/14/paye-2010-find-an-accountant-to-help-for-free/

I don't know if they are any good or not.

lilacjaffa

Thankyou for your help. Im going to email payrole for some more info.

chrismac1

I have some sympathy with llacjaffa here. Most people don't have a clue how the UK tax system works. Every month one of my clients takes on a new starter who has not got the foggiest idea what tax code should apply to their second job. I take the trouble to explain it to them and get the code right, I am afraid most payroll clerks who have worked for me down the years would have been happy just to get a box ticked on the P46 and not looked into whether it was the right box. Clearly the payroll clerk in job 2 of llacjaffa's case was one of these sorts of payroll clerks who don't go the extra mile.

If I was llacjaffa' accountant, though, I would be arguing very strongly that HMRC have had all the information they required to get his tax correct for at least 6 years. Why is this, you ask? Well, unless both of his employers failed to do their end of year payroll processing - in which case it's a £400 fine these days, not sure what it was 6 years ago - the excellent HMRC database will have been told that 2 lots of pay - both with a full ration of tax-free allowances - were being received by this taxpayer. Surely any IT programmer who has the faintest clue what he or she is doing is capable of writing a program which raises an exception report for all NI numbers where two tax codes greater than say 500L are being applied to the same NI number? And surely any organisation not populated by numpties is then capable of acting on this report within a month, and writing to the said taxpayer to reclaim the tax, whilst also writing to the second employer with a P6 and a BR tax code for the new tax year (2007-2008 at the time) to "stop the bleeding" and ensure the next tax year does not see a repeat of the error.

So Extra Statutory Concession 19, here we come! The one potential pitfall is whether llacjaffa had "reasonable belief" that his tax affairs were in order. In my view, so long as he gave the 2 payroll departments an accurate statement of his affairs, he has some cause to claim that he had such resonable belief. At the very least, even if ESC 19 ends up being kicked into touch, in my view HMRC has an obligation to ensure the underpaid tax is reclaimed over a suitably long period - for example 5 years - given that even if HMRC take the view llacjaffa has acted negligently, HMRC can hardly escape the conclusion that they themselves have also been highly negligent in this case.