SEISS Average Calculation

GeoffS1235

I have full 12 month Self Employed profits for 2018/19, 2017/18 but only 5 months for 2016/17 (I was employed prior to becoming self employed). The average has taken the much lower 2016/17 profit as being for the whole year which has resulted in a far lower payment of over £700. This is quite critical as I am still unable to work in my trade. Is there a way to register this and have it reviewed? If someone only rtraded for 1 month of one of the tax years the result could be very severe.
Thanks.

Dazed_and_C0nfused

It is being calculated correctly.

Contact your MP if you think that the law should be changed to allow a different calculation.

Bibbitybobbitybop

There are many many many (many) posts about this. It's the rules. It is correct. An appeal will fail.

GeoffS1235

Thank you. Apologies, I have just seen that there are other thread that I should have looked for first. My mistake.

Bibbitybobbitybop

It's notva problem, it's something it seems has affected a lot of people but I guess there had to be a system as simple as possible to get this implemented quickly. So many people are shouting appeal appeal but it will get no where.

GeoffS1235

I understand that but it is very arbitrary. Surely the easiest and fairest way is to divide each year by the months covered. Simple, easy to understand and would avoid HMRC getting loads of queries! Thanks for your replies.

Jeremy535897

GeoffS1235 said:

I understand that but it is very arbitrary. Surely the easiest and fairest way is to divide each year by the months covered. Simple, easy to understand and would avoid HMRC getting loads of queries! Thanks for your replies.

You can't automate that. You'd still be waiting for anything at Christmas.

Asghar

GeoffS1235 said:

Surely the easiest and fairest way is to divide each year by the months covered. Simple, easy to understand.

Not really, a tax year covers the whole 12 months.

Bibbitybobbitybop

How on earth can you divide a tax year into months. Hmrc has no idea of your monthly breakdown.

Jeremy535897

Bibbitybobbitybop said:

How on earth can you divide a tax year into months. Hmrc has no idea of your monthly breakdown.

To be fair, not quite the point. The argument is that if you only traded for half of 2016/17 because you started on 5 October 2016, say, the divisor to arrive at the monthly average should be 30 rather than 36. The problem is that you cannot easily automate the process to collect the data required, so claimants would be lucky to get anything by Christmas. (It would be possible to have a manual element bolted on later, for those who notified HMRC that their self assessment tax return for the first year they traded showed they started on ...date, and who could be entitled to a top up as a result, but it may well be that the numbers of claimants, and the amount of extra grant, involved would not make it worthwhile.)

GeoffS1235

Each tax return contains details of each employment and each self employment along with the start and end dates of each one,as well as the profit made. Its not rocket science to make that calculation. Year 1 Profit x Months traded y Average z and so on.