Proof of gift aid donations for tax credit renewals

rdans

I'll soon be renewing my tax credits claim. The value of any charitable gift aid donations made within the tax year can be disregarded from your income, meaning less money is deducted due to your income. I've made £225 of donations last year so should be able to benefit from an extra £92.25 tax credits as a result of that. Not a huge amount of money but I would obviously rather have it.
Has anyone else used gift aid donations to reduce their income when renewing? If so, what sort of evidence do they normally ask for? Just want to understand what the process is going to be before I decide whether to include it in my claim or not.

zagfles

You'll need the receipts from the charities or some sort of proof of payment (eg bank statements). Fill in TC825 (google it) and follow the instructions, these tell you to reduce the amounts you put in the declaration boxes.

You don't send them anything yet though, you need to wait till they almost accuse you of fraud, they'll probably send you a letter saying there's a mismatch between the info they have eg P60 etc and the info you declared, and then you need to write to them with the evidence.

It's a bit of a farce of a process - this is down to Gordon Brown's desire to make it "light touch", ie hardly any boxes to fill in when you claim/renew. Trouble is there's nowhere to declare gift aid etc so you have to massage the figures as instructed by the TC825. The default assumption when there's a mismatch seems to be that you've supplied incorrect figures either mistakenly or deliberately.

It's a bit of a pain but it does work, I've helped quite a few people through it although not for a few years. Doesn't look like anything has changed though, the TC825 looks to be the same.

rdans

Awesome that's super helpful thanks. I'll request some receipts from the charity.

WYSPECIAL

rdans said:

 The value of any charitable gift aid donations made within the tax year can be disregarded from your income, meaning less money is deducted due to your income. I've made £225 of donations last year so should be able to benefit from an extra £92.25 tax credits as a result of that. Not a huge amount of money but I would obviously rather have it.
Has anyone else used gift aid donations to reduce their income when renewing? If so, what sort of evidence do they normally ask for? Just want to understand what the process is going to be before I decide whether to include it in my claim or not.

Don't forget that you can add on the 20% tax you would  have paid on the money you donated so if you donated £225 then you can actually take £281.25 off your earned income when you do your declaration.

As Zagfles says when they see the mismatch they will write to you asking for evidence. The letter isn't as aggressive as it used to be. It now says if they don't hear from you then they will revert back to the P60 figure they had.

You'll probably find that the figure they pay you changes several times as a result of claiming the Gift aid but it's all corrected in the end.