HMRC's difficulty tracing payment

AlwynP

I think, after several telephone calls letters with full documentation from me, HMRC has finally managed to trace a payment made using a Debit Card.

At the end of November I received an e-mail, not a scam, telling me that there was a new message. I logged in using my Gateway Account and found that HMRC was claiming that I had not made payment of tax due. This was in spite of the fact that I had received an e-mailed acknowledgment of payment in July. It seems that, because I paid using a Debit Card, my bank could not say which account the payment had gone to and HMRC was unable to trace it.

My NI number appeared on this, also a payment reference consisting of a string of letters and numbers. They have today finally traced the payment but say that I should have entered my UTR when I paid.

All I can say is that, if there was no prompt for that, how would anyone logging into their own Gateway Account, know that additional information was needed. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience?

antonic

AlwynP wrote: »

I think, after several telephone calls letters with full documentation from me, HMRC has finally managed to trace a payment made using a Debit Card.

At the end of November I received an e-mail, not a scam, telling me that there was a new message. I logged in using my Gateway Account and found that HMRC was claiming that I had not made payment of tax due. This was in spite of the fact that I had received an e-mailed acknowledgment of payment in July. It seems that, because I paid using a Debit Card, my bank could not say which account the payment had gone to and HMRC was unable to trace it.

My NI number appeared on this, also a payment reference consisting of a string of letters and numbers. They have today finally traced the payment but say that I should have entered my UTR when I paid.

All I can say is that, if there was no prompt for that, how would anyone logging into their own Gateway Account, know that additional information was needed. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience?

HMRC are right, the only reference number you should quote is your 10 digit UTR and nothing else.
This is because HMRC get millions of payments every day and have a wide variety of bank accounts and so have accepted your payment and stored if in a suspense account while they try to work out who the payment relates to and if they cant they send you a demand.
When you make payment it does specify that you should quote your SA reference number when making payment (or any other relevant reference number for your payment).

Pennywise

As said above, you should have quoted your UTR tax reference not your NI number.

AlwynP

As the receipt included my NI number I naturally assumed that it was sufficient. Surely they should have been able to trace the payment from that as, 5 weeks after chasing me, they have now done!

Pennywise

AlwynP wrote: »

As the receipt included my NI number I naturally assumed that it was sufficient. Surely they should have been able to trace the payment from that as, 5 weeks after chasing me, they have now done!

If you'd given your UTR, it would have automatically been credited to your account by their computer system. As you didn't, it's needed manual intervention to trace it and allocate it to your account. When they have tens of millions of taxpayers, and thousands of transactions every day going into their bank accounts, doing anything manually is always going to take time, especially over the Christmas shutdown period. They'll only have a small number of staff with the authority to trace/re-allocate payments for security reasons - it's certainly not something their call centre workers will be able to do, so your request will have had to go through to different departments and assigned to an authorised member of staff (along with probably hundreds of other similar queries) around the same time.