Self assessment penelty

dartel

I live with my parents, both me and my mother suffer pretty severe mental illness, I am currently on esa and my mother is retired. Recently we have been getting threatning letters stating we owe £1600 due to late filing a self assement tax, this would be backbreaking and we really cannot afford to pay this. My question is this, after alot of reseach and doublechecking the website I found there is no reason at all she would need to do a self assement and we are reasonably sure a request was never sent. We rang the phone number provided and he agreed we should not have had to file a self assessment but sent us a form to fill in for that time period anyway. We got more letters today saying they are handing us over to debt collectors, needless to say we are scared to death. We sent the forms a few weeks back and this most recent letter is the only reply we have got, it just reads we owe £1600. We can't call them till monday, in the mean time is there any advice I can get, I can't take this stress much longer.

Is it a foregone conclusion that we have to pay the fine or can we get it cancelled on the grounds that there is no reason for us to have filed a SA return in the first place.

Mr_DB

First thing to do would be to complete the tax return for the period in question and then you can appeal in writing.

dartel

My mum was asked to fill it in. I'm sure we have had letters before but we had many deaths and an extended hospital stay for me recently, I think my mum just ignored them thinking since they have never had to or had been asked to file a return it was a clerical error. It was only recently I was able to get her to investigate. I know that's bad but we have been trying to dig our heads out of the sand and solve our debt problems. It just seems so unfair we might have to pay so much when we have never had any none PAYE taxed income.

dartel

Thanks, we will. It's been a very rough few years and my mum didn't retire out of choice, and we have never really gotten stable money-wise since she did.

dartel

I know you can't say for certain, but is it likely we can get the charges dropped after proving we should not have been eligable? My last question is assuming we appeal and they say it must be paid in full, will there be an option to pay in installments, we simply don't have that much money on hand at the minute.