Tax Summary Descrepancy

niknak_2

Hi,

Ive just received my Tax Summary for 2015-16 and there is a huge £5000 discrepancy between my total taxable income and a letter denoting my total gross salary from my employer.

How can I check which figure is right?

Am I potentially being underpaid?

Any help would be greatly appreciated
Cheers

agrinnall

Have you paid £5000 into a pension scheme?

niknak_2

agrinnall wrote: »

Have you paid £5000 into a pension scheme?

That's it!!!!

It must be my contributions to the teacher pension scheme

Thanks for your help

dori2o

These Annual tax summaries cause more trouble than they are worth.

For one the information regarding where your tax is spent is extremely misleading.

An example is the welfare section.

Not only does this not define what part of this is for disabilities, long/short term sickness claims etc, but public service pensions are also included in this section. Since when has a pension been defined as a welfare payment?

This then leads to the bigoted/uneducated morons who believe welfare should be abolished in all forms , to argue their moronic points further based on figures which bear no representation of the true figures.

They are the brainchild of Dave and Gideon, which tells you all you need to know. That they are nothing more than a propoganda tool to drive up public unrest towards welfare in order to garner support for the Government's abhorrent attacks on the poor, sick and disabled.

They are nothing more than a snapshot of individual tax records. Not official calculations, not proof of income, not assessible, not used to recover tax or charge additional tax.

Its costing far more to issue and service the barrage of calls that HMRC get regarding these letters where mostly people dont understand what it is, what its for, or why its been issued.

When asked if they want to continue geting them the vast majority (over 80%) say they dont want to receive them in future.

Its one of the biggest Government scams and a complete waste of public money. It should be scrapped immediately.

uknick

dori2o wrote: »

These Annual tax summaries cause more trouble than they are worth....

Couldn't agree more. I spend time every year having to explain the figures should not be taken verbatim.

Bob_Bank_Spanker_2

dori2o wrote: »

An example is the welfare section.

Not only does this not define what part of this is for disabilities, long/short term sickness claims etc, but public service pensions are also included in this section. Since when has a pension been defined as a welfare payment?
.

I would absolutely count the state pension as a welfare payment.

p00hsticks

Bob_Bank_Spanker wrote: »

I would absolutely count the state pension as a welfare payment.

State pensions, yes. But 'public service' pensions (by which I presume dori2o means 'private' pensions paid to those previously employed in the public sector such as civil service, police, etc) ? I've not seen the latest summaries being discussed, but I'd be very surprised if the welfare section does actually include such public service pensions.

agrinnall

p00hsticks wrote: »

State pensions, yes. But 'public service' pensions (by which I presume dori2o means 'private' pensions paid to those previously employed in the public sector such as civil service, police, etc) ? I've not seen the latest summaries being discussed, but I'd be very surprised if the welfare section does actually include such public service pensions.

I've just dug my latest summary out, it doesn't break things down to the level dori2o refers to, it simply gives an amount for Welfare. And the online guidance doesn't do that either, in fact it doesn't even mention the part showing how your tax is spent.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/annual-tax-summary

So I can only assume that dori2o is looking at one of the HMRC manuals, perhaps we can be told which one so that we can check for ourselves (for what it's worth p00hsticks I agree with you that it doesn't seem likely that such pension payments would be included in the Welfare figure).

dori2o

agrinnall wrote: »

I've just dug my latest summary out, it doesn't break things down to the level dori2o refers to, it simply gives an amount for Welfare. And the online guidance doesn't do that either, in fact it doesn't even mention the part showing how your tax is spent.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/annual-tax-summary

So I can only assume that dori2o is looking at one of the HMRC manuals, perhaps we can be told which one so that we can check for ourselves (for what it's worth p00hsticks I agree with you that it doesn't seem likely that such pension payments would be included in the Welfare figure).

https://fullfact.org/economy/what-you-need-know-about-treasurys-tax-statement/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/04/welfare-tax-statements-prime-minister-pension

https://secondreading.uk/economy/hmrcs-new-annual-tax-summary-whats-in-welfare/

And last but not least

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-public-spending-was-calculated-in-your-tax-summary/how-public-spending-was-calculated-in-your-tax-summary

Where you will find this in section 3

Where possible, the tax summary uses the same headings as PESA does, such as for defence or health. However, initial testing with taxpayers indicated that the summaries would be more useful if the data were presented using accessible and easily-understood labels. Some PESA categories are broadly defined and contain significant areas of expenditure that are often considered as discrete from one another, and so it has been necessary, in some instances, to break down the data into segments that are more easily accessible for taxpayers.

For instance, state pensions are a significant area of ‘social protection’, so they have been shown as a separate category. As the data for state pensions is not published separately in PESA for 2015/16, the state pension number is taken from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook, March 2016. The remainder of ‘social protection’ has also been renamed ‘welfare’, in line with the consideration that terms should be accessible and easily understood by taxpayers. The Social protection category follows UN Statistics guidance (as outlined above) it therefore includes spending on items such as unemployment benefits, tax credits, public sector pensions and various benefits/support covering categories such ‘old age’, ‘sickness and disability’, ‘Housing’, ‘Family/Children’ and ‘personal social services’.

agrinnall

Thanks for posting that. I must admit I forgot to look for a State Pensions entry on the summary, so as it is definitely there it's pretty clear that any reference to pensions under the Welfare category must be something else, and your extract indeed appears to show that it's pensions paid to public sector pensioners. It's a bit bizarre that the UN would include such payments as a Welfare item but perhaps it makes more sense in other parts of the world and the UK has to follow suit.

booksurr

well I live in blissful ignorance of whatever you are wittering on about as I have never looked at my "tax summary", nor would I know how to.

I submit my tax return on time and that is that as far as I am concerned iro my "engagement" with HMRC. I pay what I owe and I owe what I pay.

Those envious of public sector pensions are free to apply for a public sector job.