PhD student with strange tax code

phona

Hi all,

I'm asking on behalf of my partner, who takes absolutely no interest at all in financial affairs. His P60 arrived today and it has a rather odd tax code of S206T M1. I've gathered what the letters and numbers mean, but I can't understand why his personal allowance is £2060. Stranger still, the total pay given is less than £2060, yet tax was still taken.

He has recently finished his PhD and was in receipt of a stipend, which I'm given to understand is tax free so shouldn't affect the tax code. He was also paid for a post-doc project for 6 months (some of which was in the 2016/17 tax year) and for irregular hours teaching at the university.

The details are pretty vague at this point. I hope I can get my hands on some payslips, but meantime does anyone have any idea how this tax code came to be? Can I contact HMRC on his behalf?

Thanks in advance.

Dazed_and_confused

You can only have a personal allowance in 2016:17 of £2060 if total income was £117,880.

A more likely explanation is that his tax code has been split between jobs. If he has no interest in his finances it's possible his tax records aren't as upto date as they could be.

Simplest way to check what's happening in the short term i.e next few minutes is to get him to log onto his personal tax account on gov.uk and you'll then be able to see what job(s) HMRC thinks he has and what he's earning at each one (if more than one).

You should also be able to see what information the employer(s) have been sending into HMRC.

Nothing odd about tax being deducted when the code was on an emergency basis (the M1 bit).

agrinnall

You can speak to HMRC, but only if he speaks to them first to authorise it. However, if it was me I would give him a (metaphorical) slap and tell him to get his lazy behind into gear.

00ec25

you say you understand what the letters and numbers mean so you now know he needs to speak to HMRC and authorise them to allow you to deal with his tax affairs since he is so incompetent (phd or not)

- on a month 1 code he will never pay the correct amount of tax
- on a T code HMRC know something is wrong, but don'rt know what as they are awaiting info
- on an S code he needs to talk to (a soon to be independent) Scotland
- on 2060 he needs to find out how that cwas calculated given he presumably ignores any paperwork they originally sent him explaining the calculation in the first place
- the stipend may well have been tax free depending on who the awarding body was, for example a research council? In which case it is entirely excluded from the calculation of his taxable income and should not appear in his tax code at all
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim06205

badmemory

The thing is that with a tax code of S206T M1 code if he earned more than £170 in any one month he would pay tax. What was his code for April & May? Hopefully an improvement!

Maybe time to scare him into at least letting you do something about it by informing him that they can use a code to take anything up to half his taxable income every month. Unlikely to happen but if things get in enough of a mess it could. They aren't allowed to take more than half.

phona

Thanks guys.

I think the more I looked at the darn P60 the less sense it made to me! I guess I was looking for clarification that I wasn't missing something that might've been obvious to folks here. My own tax affairs are blessedly simple so I don't know details.

Hopefully dangling the carrot of getting the tax refunded will be motivation enough for him to contact HMRC. Sometimes there's no substitute for pouring over the ol' paperwork!