Government unveils help for self-employed - MSE News

gt94sss2

Just to note that while the government has announced a second SEISS grant in August, if are eligible to claim for the first grant and haven't yet you must now do so by Monday 13 July if you want it

bobbooo

unholyangel said:

bobbooo said:

Jeremy535897 said:

I assume that the Government thinks it has to use figures that have already been filed, otherwise people could deliberately manipulate them. That logic falls down for a number of reasons:

• people have always had an incentive to manipulate the figures, albeit in the opposite direction
• people could in theory still amend their SA return for 2018/19 (although it would be a very brave person indeed that did)
• people who are delinquent in filing their 2018/19 return can still manipulate the figures (the benefit of not obeying the rules in the first place)

The cases I'm talking about (starting your business at the end of the 16/17 or 17/18 tax years and then continuing to run until the present day) do use figures that have already been filed. In order to be fair, in these cases HMRC should not count tax years with partial profits like these and just take the average of profits for the full tax years filed within the last three years. Averaging partial with full-year profits would be entirely illogical and unfair. These cases are distinct from people who started their business part way through the 18/19 tax year, for whom HMRC have no other full filed years to go on so have to use the filed figure for that year.

And that would result in some people claiming they only traded for part of the year (due to sickness, holiday or whatever), in order to inflate their earnings.

There's a specific section of the tax return for people who started trading partway through the tax year, so they can't falsely claim this retroactively. HMRC didn't even need to look at the start date in this section, all they needed to do was see if it was filled in at all, and if so disregard that year as it was partial and just average over the remaining full years. You can't get much simpler than that. There's no excuse for them not to now make this adjustment for those who have been unfairly disadvantaged in this way.