SEISS Average Calculation

Jeremy535897

Computer programs easily take figures from a box, but they can't easily find a month in a string of characters that are not in a consistent format.

Bibbitybobbitybop

You're right it may not be rocket science but it would have to be done manually for how many million people? Good luck getting any money before 2022.

GeoffS1235

Jeremy535897 said:

Computer programs easily take figures from a box, but they can't easily find a month in a string of characters that are not in a consistent format.

Really? Quite an easy bit of code. Database will contain start and end dates of each self employment and the earnings. Dates are stored in a consistent format. If their programmers cant code that calculation they shouldn't be employed.

Jeremy535897

I can only assume that there was something that stopped it being easy to do, like the problem for sole directors and dividends. It's all speculation, and the rules are as they designed them.

Jeremy535897

Thinking more about this, and thinking about the government's obsession with fraud (expecting existing employers to add loads of fake employees to their payroll, and self employed people to inflate their profits for 2019/20 to increase the grant), I wonder whether the issue might be that people may take a very different view of when they started to trade (and may well delay it as long as possible to reduce class 2 NIC), so it is just unreliable as a piece of data on which to base the calculations?

bobbooo

Jeremy535897 said:

I can only assume that there was something that stopped it being easy to do, like the problem for sole directors and dividends. It's all speculation, and the rules are as they designed them.

You're giving them way too much benefit of the doubt. They didn't even need to read the values in the start-date field. All they needed to do was see if there was any value in that field at all, as that's only filled in if the business started after the first day of the tax year (and so the tax return is recording partial instead of full-year profits). If the field is filled in, ignore that tax return and take the average only over the other years. Simple. This could have easily been automated with the simplest of code by any competent IT professional. The current flawed implementation of the scheme is down to either incompetence, or an intentional choice in order to reduce the total payout at the cost of many people's livelihoods. There are no other explanations. There is now no excuse whatsoever for HMRC not to recalculate the grant in the way I described for people who appeal against an unfairly low figure due to incorrectly using partial-year profits as if they were full-year profits in the average calculation.

Jeremy535897

When you are personally affected by something that I agree seems to work unfairly, it is easy to believe in incompetence or malice. We see it on the news all the time with even the experienced interviewers like Andrew Marr asking ridiculous questions like "can you guarantee the safety of every teacher if the schools go back on 1 June?" As I don't qualify for a penny of state assistance in any form, it is easier for me to be dispassionate. If I were mounting an argument on how to do the SEISS more fairly, I think I would have just gone back to 2016/17 like they did, but give people the higher of 80% of 3 months of 2018/19 and the average of 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19 (or the average of whichever of these years they were trading).

bobbooo

Jeremy535897 said:

When you are personally affected by something that I agree seems to work unfairly, it is easy to believe in incompetence or malice. We see it on the news all the time with even the experienced interviewers like Andrew Marr asking ridiculous questions like "can you guarantee the safety of every teacher if the schools go back on 1 June?" As I don't qualify for a penny of state assistance in any form, it is easier for me to be dispassionate. If I were mounting an argument on how to do the SEISS more fairly, I think I would have just gone back to 2016/17 like they did, but give people the higher of 80% of 3 months of 2018/19 and the average of 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19 (or the average of whichever of these years they were trading).

You've just highlighted my point even further actually. If two blokes (and others I've seen) on a money saving forum can come up with implementations of the scheme much fairer than the existing one just off the top of their heads, that makes the case for incompetence or deliberate engineered flaws on the part of the government in order to save money even stronger. My suggestion was simply the easiest one I could think of that would require minimal extra work and is still able to be fully automated. What matters now is that they implement these easy to make adjustments for people who have been unfairly disadvantaged and have appealed. There's no valid argument against doing this.

Grumpy_chap

Given how generous the SEISS and CJRS schemes are, it hardly seems fair to say "deliberate engineered flaws on the part of the government in order to save money"

Jeremy535897

I would just say that I think there would be more chance of getting a change for any extension of SEISS than a recalculation of the existing grant. But who knows. If you are correct about why the current calculation is used, logically you should accept any attempt to change the past is unlikely to succeed. By presenting the case for a revision as a constructive proposal for the future, based on the experience of the grant to date, you give them a way of looking like they listen, rather than looking stupid or devious.