Does the Tax Office make mistakes?

Bogof_Babe

My husband has just had his Annual Tax Summary 2014-15, and they have itemised "other pension income" at nearly £3,000 over what it actually is.

He recently had a letter from his occupational pension provider advising him of a massive increase of... £33 per annum! It is a final salary scheme, and nothing has changed in his circumstances for many years (he is now 69). He receives full SRP, and has a small job with the Council, which is listed separately, and tax is deducted from his pay.

Is there likely to be any logical explanation for this, or does he need to phone them tomorrow?

agrinnall

Yes is the answer (is there anyone who doesn't make a mistake?).

Phone them, early is best, there have been several threads in the last few days where the summary has had strange entries. I don't think any of them have been given an explanation but your husband should get it corrected even if it has no impact on his tax position.

Bogof_Babe

Thank you. It does affect his tax payable - using their mistaken figure they will be over-taxing him by about £100 a month!

Will phone in the morning.

chrismac1

Read my strapline, nowt more to say.

Bogof_Babe

chrismac1 wrote: »

Read my strapline, nowt more to say.

Love it! If it wasn't so annoying it would be well funny :rotfl:

Doesn't anyone bother to try to prevent this sort of thing? You need to be vigilant and on the ball to spot such errors. If it had been a lesser amount of inaccuracy we probably wouldn't have noticed.

Vortigern

Bogof_Babe wrote: »

Does the Tax Office make mistakes?

Is the Pope a Catholic?

I've just received an annual statement that shows my pension income and my income from employment. I have been retired for several years and have no income from employment!

If I ring the taxman will he tell me who my employer is?

dori2o

The annual tax statements are a complete and utter waste of time.

In the majority of cases because they use some estimated income, and because they use income that is not recorded on your tax record, or they adapt reductions in your tax code to read like they are income when they are not (i.e. Higher rate adjustment for investment income) the Annual tax summary in many cases will be wrong.

HMRC have absolutely no way to correct the information on the ATS, they cannot issue a duplicate, they cannot issue an amended ATS. All they can do when you phone is look and see that the information held on your tax record is correct, which in 99.9% of the cases I have had over the past few weeks the information currently held is correct and the correct tax is being deducted.

Although they are issued with the HMRC header on them the information is not compiled by HMRC, the tax records are scanned by a 3rd party organisation who compiles the information and then issues it via HMRC's central print offices on a standard document template.

The Annual tax summary is generated from information held in the last tax year, that means it may or may not include details of the employments/pensions you received in 14/15, it may only refer to the income you received in 13/14 if the 14/15 information wasn't fully available at the time your record was scanned.

The information on the Annual Tax Summary is not used in any way by HMRC to review the tax position for this year, least year, next year or any other year.

The Annual Tax Summary is a propaganda tool used by the Government in order to outrage people into seeing what amount of money is paid to what part of the economy.

The figures themselves for this are skewed as Private Sector pensions are included within the section for Welfare.

You can phone and ask HMRC to remove you from the Annual Tax Summary list, meaning you will not receive one in future. To be honest you'd be better of given they bear no resemblence to what they attempt to show.

teddysmum

My husband, who is 67 but still working received his Statement and though it doesn't list him as paying NI contributions (ie correctly) it gives an amount that his employer paid.


I thought that when someone reaches State Pension age and no longer pays NI contributions, the same applied to the employer's contributions.

Bogof_Babe

teddysmum wrote: »

My husband, who is 67 but still working received his Statement and though it doesn't list him as paying NI contributions (ie correctly) it gives an amount that his employer paid.


I thought that when someone reaches State Pension age and no longer pays NI contributions, the same applied to the employer's contributions.

I noticed the very same thing this morning. Most mysterious.

patanne

The employer still needs to keep paying their part of the NI even though the employee's part stops. The NI category changes from A to C.

sleepless_saver

dori2o wrote: »

You can phone and ask HMRC to remove you from the Annual Tax Summary list, meaning you will not receive one in future. To be honest you'd be better of given they bear no resemblence to what they attempt to show.

Have just done so, thanks for pointing that out. It's also possible to opt out online.