Working from Home Tax Refund

Pennywise

Are you sure you got it directly from HMRC and not from one of the "copy-cat" sites purporting to be official but through which you sign away a percentage of your refund to them as their fee? It just doesn't sound right to me.

pennypincher3562

Ok I've double checked, and it's definitely an HMRC form (101% sure.)

I've also read it more closely, and as Antrobus says, the form mentions that 'The weekly rate was £3 until it was increased to £4 from 2012/13 onwards.'

Thanks Antrobus for checking Google, however I put the wording in my own writing.

The actual wording is:

"'Is the room that you use as an office used for any other purpose at any other time?'

In my instance, the answer to the above is yes.

I see that Dazed and Confused says that since I've done a Self Assessment, I won't be able to use the form they have sent me, which is a bit of a bummer.

jimmo

pennypincher3562 wrote: »

Ok I've double checked, and it's definitely an HMRC form (101% sure.)

I’m not too surprised by that. In my latter days at HMRC they were producing all sorts of word processed letters and questionnaires (under a system called SEES if I remember correctly).
Now that we know you were in SA for all the relevant years we can now see that the correct way to handle this was that you needed to amend your Returns.
Assuming you file your Returns online you should have amended your 2014/15 Return and written to HMRC to amend the earlier years.
This link hopefully explains.
https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns/corrections
You can still do all that now if you wish remembering that your claim will be £3 per week for 2011/12 and £4 per week for 2012/13 onwards.
As to the form they sent you, if the letter you wrote in August simply asked for a form on which to make your claim or you didn’t include all the information needed to enable them to amend your earlier Returns then HMRC have done the right thing in sending the form to you, albeit with an incredibly bad delay.
If, however, your letter did contain all the information needed you may well have grounds for making a formal complaint.
As its 9 years since I retired I don’t feel I am the right person to judge whether you starting again from scratch or completing the forms you now have and continuing the ongoing correspondence will get you the quicker result but, if it were me, I would start again making absolutely sure that I fully followed the process as laid out in the link above.

ManofLeisure_2

[QUOTE=pennypincher3562;69642471


Will HMRC take issue that my living room was also used as an office, and not issue me with the tax refund?

Cheers
PennyPincher3562[/QUOTE]

My understanding is that HMRC will issue a tax refund in this situation. If you state the number of hours per week (when the living room becomes the office), a calculation will be made based on this criteria.

Savvy_Sue

pennypincher3562 wrote: »

I'm currently filling out the form for a working from home tax rebate. I have come to the question where they ask 'was your office space used exclusively as an office, or for other purposes.'

I used my living room, so it wasn't exclusively used as an office.

ManofLeisure wrote: »

My understanding is that HMRC will issue a tax refund in this situation. If you state the number of hours per week (when the living room becomes the office), a calculation will be made based on this criteria.

I disagree that the number of hours is relevant. The OP was employed, but working from home. It's a flat rate thing.

It is possible that the question becomes relevant to the Valuation Agency, where if part of a property is used exclusively for business purposes, then that part of the property CAN be taken out of domestic Council Tax and assessed under Business Rates.

Which is one reason why, if you have a home office, it's worth keeping the ironing board or the guest bed in there.

But not in this situation.

booksurr

ManofLeisure wrote: »

My understanding is that HMRC will issue a tax refund in this situation. If you state the number of hours per week (when the living room becomes the office), a calculation will be made based on this criteria.

OP is an employee, your comment is irrelevant as he can only claim the flat rate

ManofLeisure_2

booksurr wrote: »

OP is an employee, your comment is irrelevant as he can only claim the flat rate

I stand corrected booksurr

Apologies PennyPincher, I only read your first post and 'assumed' that you were self employed.

TheCyclingProgrammer

booksurr wrote: »

OP is an employee, your comment is irrelevant as he can only claim the flat rate

I'm going to be pedantic here but the £4/week is not a "flat rate" or an allowance (although its often treated as one) and it isn't the limit on what you can claim as an employee working from home.

Assuming you're eligible to claim tax relief on working from home then you can actually claim your additional costs (e.g. extra utility costs), but not a share of any existing fixed costs (like self-employed people can). Anything up to £4/week can be claimed without providing further evidence but anything in excess of this requires evidence to back the claim up.

For somebody working from home a lot your expenses could be more than £4/week and if you can show evidence of this, then you can claim it.

https://www.gov.uk/tax-relief-for-employees/working-at-home

The amount you claim isn't directly related to how many rooms/hours a week but you might use this information to calculate your additional utility costs.

It is true that most people just treat the £4/week as an allowance and claim that (I do myself) as it requires the least effort.

pennypincher3562

Hi

Thanks for all the suggestions so far, very helpful. However, I am getting a bit bogged down with all the jargon, and trying to get over one hurdle at a time.

My current hurdle is amending my 2014/2015 tax return online so that I can claim the '£4 flat rate' for the number of weeks I worked for my employer.

In the online return I was asked:

'Do you wish to claim any employment expenses or capital allowances while working for (employer name)?'

I answered 'yes' to the above, and was then presented with the following options:



I can't see any option in the above to try and claim £4 x 49 weeks in the above. Am I even on the right screen in the online self assessment?

Thanks
PennyPincher3562

jimmo

Other expenses and capital allowances.