Employer got value wrong on my P60 in 2017-18 – received a letter from self assessment

ThereIsABigHole

Hello. My ex-employer got my payment numbers way off in 2017-18 and I've just been contacted my HMRC. The sum of unpaid taxes goes around 9k. Looks like the employer added my earnings of a previous job into my P60 for that year. I have accessed the HRMC website and it's very clear, there was a mistake. The sum of taxable income I have for that year are way under 

ThereIsABigHole

* sorry, posted by accident. Continuing:
The total of taxable income is way over the sum of taxable income for every previous month. What would be your recommended way of approaching this?
Thanks!

Jeremy535897

The starting point is to ask your employer for an amended P60.

inspectorperez

Just to be clear, if you have changed jobs during a tax year, there will be two separate figures shown on the P60 issued by your then current employer for:

• Gross pay in previous employment/s
• Gross pay in this employment
• Total Gross pay ( a sum total of the above two amounts)

There will be corresponding tax deduction figures for each of the above.

Are you absolutely clear this is not the case?

ThereIsABigHole

Hey Inspector. That is exactly where the mistake is.
Looks like the employer put the sum of the previous and current (at the time) employment in the "gross pay in this employment" form. So HMRC thinks I earned the money from my previous employer twice. That's where the error came from.

inspectorperez

ThereIsABigHole said:

Hey Inspector. That is exactly where the mistake is.
Looks like the employer put the sum of the previous and current (at the time) employment in the "gross pay in this employment" form. So HMRC thinks I earned the money from my previous employer twice. That's where the error came from.

Mistake and a half !!

As Jeremy says, corrected P60 required as starting point pdq

nick74

ThereIsABigHole said:

Hey Inspector. That is exactly where the mistake is.
Looks like the employer put the sum of the previous and current (at the time) employment in the "gross pay in this employment" form. So HMRC thinks I earned the money from my previous employer twice. That's where the error came from.

Considering that most payroll is processed by computer and submited by RTI nowadays it's incredible that something like that can happen. Surely it wasn't a handwritten P60? I have experience of a few payroll software packages and none of them would let you do something like that even if you wanted to. Unless of course they've put the blank P60 form in the printer so badly misaligned that it's printed the figures in the wrong boxes perhaps?