Personal savings allowance

masonic

Tom99 wrote: »

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]HMRC say they following re duty to report interest received:[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]If your not employed, do not get a pension or do not complete Self-Assessment, your bank or building society will tell HMRC how much interest you received at the end of the year. HMRC will tell you if you need to pay tax and how to pay it.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]If the interest you received was £10,000 or more, you need to complete a Self-Assessment tax return.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]So if you get less than £10,000pa and don't complete a SA, just sit back and see what happens. I can't see how HMRC would fine you in later years if you do nothing based on their own advise.[/FONT]

Interesting, I haven't revisited this for a while. In the last tax year I received <£1,000 in savings interest and about £2,800 in P2P interest. I can claim bad debt relief on some of the P2P interest as I have had some bad debt over the same period.

My original plan was to wait until towards the end of the year, when I'll know how much of the bad debt is recoverable and then declare the interest and ask for the appropriate bad debt relief.

Perhaps an alternative option is to wait and see what figure HMRC comes up with after receiving information direct from the banks and P2P platforms and I might not have to do anything.

Dazed_and_confused

But P2P isn't a bank or building society. Yet. Or are some now banks??

masonic

Dazed_and_confused wrote: »

But P2P isn't a bank or building society. Yet. Or are some now banks??

The wording on the HMRC site is "income from savings and investments". It includes things like income from Gilts and corporate bonds as well as interest from savings and P2P lending.

"You need to report:
- any income of £2,500 or more that has not been taxed, such as tips or commission
- income from savings and investments of £10,000 or more before tax
- income from dividends of £10,000 or more before tax"

Several P2P platforms have confirmed that they have the same reporting obligations as the banks when it comes to P2P interest.

parker1982

My experience for the 2016/17 tax year was that only a handful of the banks / building societies provided HMRC with details of the interest I earned. I had to work it all out manually after downloading interest certificates or requesting them by post for a lot of the regular savers to make sure the details HMRC had were correct.

When I was on the phone to a number of the banks regarding the reporting of interest to HMRC such as Tesco and TSB they both said it was my responsibility to report to HMRC and not theirs.

I informed HMRC of this but they didn't seem interested. I agree with the principle that ensuring the information HMRC is the taxpayers responsibility but I feel its pretty pointless to officially say that banks and building societies will report this info to HMRC when hardly any of them bother.

One of the most annoying things I found with the personal tax account on the gov.uk website was that it wouldn't allow me to add details of the missing savings interest, I could only add or remove the few details details that existed there. In the end I spent a significant amount of time on the phone to HMRC whilst manually updating details of all my accounts. I would have preferred to just email them details of all my interest generating accounts but they only deal with work by post or by phone.

Newly_retired

It is really annoying that I have to do Self Assessment because I receive a mere £330 pa French pension, so I use it to declare my savings interest, which is in excess of £1000 but nowhere anywhere near £10000.
I do not know if HMRC have any way of checking my figures. My French pension statement is for a calendar year so is not much help.
For savings interest I gather all the information, either online or from printed certificates, though for some accounts I just have to add up the monthly interest myself. I hope HMRC agree with my totals. There are too many items to use their calculation page.

Dazed_and_confused

They do report it. They are under a legal obligation to do so.

Whether HMRC can link that information to your personal tax account is a different matter.

As has been mentioned previously there is no obligation for a National Insurance number to be provided on a non ISA account and gov.uk advice was that if you had joint accounts you needed to report that yourself.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/personal-savings-allowance-factsheet/personal-savings-allowance#what-you-need-to-do

colsten

Newly_retired wrote: »

It is really annoying that I have to do Self Assessment because I receive a mere £330 pa French pension, so I use it to declare my savings interest, which is in excess of £1000 but nowhere anywhere near £10000.
I do not know if HMRC have any way of checking my figures. My French pension statement is for a calendar year so is not much help.
For savings interest I gather all the information, either online or from printed certificates, though for some accounts I just have to add up the monthly interest myself. I hope HMRC agree with my totals. There are too many items to use their calculation page.

Unless you go over the £10k annual taxable savings interest, you don't have to provide HMRC with a line by line list of where you earned the interest. One bottom line number suffices. I record my monthly interest payments in AceMoney (more or less a clone of MS Money), so at any point in time I know what my bottom line taxable interest payments were in any period. For the last tax year, the figure HMRC had from the banks was more or less the correct figure though I noticed that one or two banks had failed to report, and/or the HMRC were unable to allocate reported numbers to me. In previous years, I had just given HMRC a bottom line number, and they never asked for a breakdown.

I agree it's a bit of a pain having to do a self-assessment just because you get a few pennies of income abroad. There should be an exemption for trivial amounts.

soulsaver

Tom99 wrote: »

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]No its not. The Government website can cope with an apostrophe but this website cannot![/FONT]

In a hole & still digging...

soulsaver

colsten wrote: »

Unless you go over the £10k annual taxable savings interest, you don't have to provide HMRC with a line by line list of where you earned the interest.

I'd agree with your interpretation, but maybe wishful thinking on my part, because best to point out that isn't what HMRC's webby actually says...

"you need to provide a tax return if, in the last tax year:

..your income from savings or investments was £10,000 or more before tax - ..."

Note it doesn't say your taxable income.

https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns/who-must-send-a-tax-return

colsten

soulsaver wrote: »

I'd agree with your interpretation, but maybe wishful thinking on my part, because best to point out that isn't what HMRC's webby actually says...

"you need to provide a tax return if, in the last tax year:

..your income from savings or investments was £10,000 or more before tax - ..."

Note it doesn't say your taxable income.

https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns/who-must-send-a-tax-return

Yeah but it also says [somewhere, in the actual SA or the help sheet for it, IIRC] that you don't need to declare ISAs. As far as I can remember, there's also no room on the SA form for declaring non-taxable interest, so all you can/should do is declare your taxable interest. Unless you are a sucker for overpaying tax, that is


EDIT: Also says it here: "If you complete a tax return, you don't need to declare any ISA interest, income or capital gains on it."