National Insurance Query please can anyone help

katies_mum

Seems they are not going to give it me back!

Thanks for your email.

The quarterly national insurance allowances you quoted are for employees who are permanently paid quarterly, not those who submit claim forms and are paid monthly.

When we receive claim forms for you, they are processed based on your earnings in the month being paid (per HMRC regulations). Had the claims been submitted at the end of each claim period, you would not have paid national insurance. Each month’s claims should be submitted for payment by the due dates for the following month.

We operate a monthly payroll for your school, not a quarterly one. All the tax/national insurance allowances are pre-programmed into our system to process monthly. If we were to operate a quarterly payroll for some employees, your employer would have to pay additional costs for that service as there would be a separate payroll process required.

I hope that clarifies the situation for you, but if not, please let me know.

chrisbur

katies_mum wrote: »

Seems they are not going to give it me back!

Thanks for your email.

The quarterly national insurance allowances you quoted are for employees who are permanently paid quarterly, not those who submit claim forms and are paid monthly.

When we receive claim forms for you, they are processed based on your earnings in the month being paid (per HMRC regulations). Had the claims been submitted at the end of each claim period, you would not have paid national insurance. Each month’s claims should be submitted for payment by the due dates for the following month.

We operate a monthly payroll for your school, not a quarterly one. All the tax/national insurance allowances are pre-programmed into our system to process monthly. If we were to operate a quarterly payroll for some employees, your employer would have to pay additional costs for that service as there would be a separate payroll process required.

I hope that clarifies the situation for you, but if not, please let me know.

Some situations require a degree of manual intervention not just letting the computer do its thing and unfortunately if they are not prepared to co-operate on this your only other option would be to contact HMRC.
I cannot say if they would offer any help as I have no idea how helpful they are these days. They might contact the payroll dept. they might just tell you to contact them and you already know where that leads. Even if they contact the payroll dept. the payroll dept. may well say that they were not advised this covered 3 months (quite possible this is the case) and HMRC may agree that in this case it should stand.
They may suggest that you put in a repayment claim at the year end explaining why you feel you over-paid (perhaps helped by a letter from your employer explaining what period it covered)
Also if HMRC get involved could well lead to some degree of bad feeling between all involved.

Afraid it is a question of how hard you want to push this and without some co-operation from the payroll dept. I cannot say how likely it is to be successful. HMRC do certainly appear to be a lot less helpful these days than when I was involved in payroll so they may well take the view that this is not worth getting involved with.

I would point out to the employer that by not putting these payments in monthly they have not only caused you to loose money but have also caused loss to themselves. They have paid employer's NI that they need not have paid. Hopefully then that would at least avoid it happening in the future.

Pennywise

chrisbur wrote: »

I would point out to the employer that by not putting these payments in monthly they have not only caused you to loose money but have also caused loss to themselves. They have paid employer's NI that they need not have paid. Hopefully then that would at least avoid it happening in the future.

I think the point being made by payroll is that more than a month's worth of earnings were claimed on a single monthly payroll claim form. They say

"Had the claims been submitted at the end of each claim period, you would not have paid national insurance.".

The answer for the future is to claim monthly as amounts are earned/worked rather than accumulate

katies_mum

Thank you. If I had known about this I would have submitted my claim forms on a more regular basis. Thought it would be nice to get one larger lump sum than small bits and also assumed it was easier for everyone involved. I have learnt from this and will never do it again! luckily its only £17 I have lost out on.

Funny though last year I paid tax on my small amount of earnings (which I got back when I did self assessment) but they took no NI!!

I will make sure this doesn`t happen again