Should have signed off self-employed 3 years ago!

HKitten

This is a little complicated, I'm just not sure where to start! I hope someone here can give me a place to begin....

Anyone who's seen any of my other threads has probably guessed that my partner is a financial mess. He's better now than he was but sometimes his attitude to problems is 'I don't care, let it sort itself' which doesn't exactly work.

He was self-employed in 2008 for about 2-3 months. The company then went under so he went and got employed and signed off as self-employed. Only for whatever reason, it didn't get processed and so for the last three years (as I'm now finding out) HMRC has believed he's self-employed.

He refuses to put time into sorting this out as he thinks since he was a mixture of employed and on benefits at different periods of time, they should have known he wasn't self-employed.

So I'm sorting it out. But I don't know where to begin. I spoke to someone at HMRC and they said he'd need to file a return for each the years he's missed. Now luckily he has records of how much he earned when he was self-employed, but nothing else until his most recent line of work, and he's had several temp jobs.

I asked for a copy of his registered jobs from HMRC and they sent it. There are gaps where he was neither employed or on benefits, and the parts where he was on benefits don't appear to be shown? Will they care about that sort of thing or will they just want the details of the work he did, not an account of what he was doing for 365 days of the year?

Should I just get him registered on the self-assessment online system and muddle through from there? He's built up fines now because he has just left this. Will they get adjusted once I put in the assessments?

jimmo

At least one of you is taking this seriously and I hope you can get the mess sorted out, but it is going to be hard work.
From an Income Tax point of view the red tape is that once you are in Self Assessment, you are in it until HMRC let you go.
Being self-employed in 2008 took him into Self Assessment for 2007/08 or 2008/09 and, assuming it was 2008/09 he has been required to complete Self Assessment Returns for 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/11.
The simple solution is to submit the outstanding Returns as quickly as possible but, obviously, this is easier said than done.
I see that HMRC have already provided a copy of "his registered jobs". That is a good starting point but we didn't do that in my days at HMRC. So it is not familiar territory to me.
If you need details of his dole, I think they call it JSA these days he should be able to get details from the dole office, Jobcentre or Jobcentre+. In theory, that should be quite easy but I can't comment on the practicalities.
Then, when you have a record of his jobs and dole payments you will need to check very carefully whether there are any unexplained gaps.
If there are gaps, its not the end of the world but the more details you are prepared to share the better chance you have of getting valuable advice on here.
Coming back to HMRC matters, as I understand it, the on-line system enables people to make current returns. As of now you can do a 2010/11 Return but you can't do a 2009/10 or earlier Return on-line.
I suggest you phone HMRC and ask them to send you paper versions of all outstanding Returns.
Then you will have something to work with and something we can help with.

chrismac1

In practice, I find JSA are often totally unhelpful when it comes to providing information about clients - not as bad as HMRC usually are, but not far off. I suggest the following practical approach:

1. Call JSA and mentally give them a reasonable deadline to deliver the goods - say 3 weeks.
2. Three weeks later submit the returns with the information you do have.
3. On the "notes" section of the returns, note that there was some JSA income not included because JSA have failed to come up with the goods.
4. I use similar notes often, in my opinion no-one at HMRC ever reads them even in cases where aspects of the returns are being queried. But no matter, you have put a tick in the box and your "notes" have covered you against possible comeback for submitting an incomplete return.

sandraroffey

when he stopped receiving any benefits when he wasnt working, the benefits people would have given him a P45. and any year he received benefits, he would have been send a P60 at the end of that financial year. both those things would say what he received in benefits in any given year,