HELP PLEASE: HMRC notice stamp duty not paid (but we sent the money to the conveyancers!)

IlikeDogs

I've been a long-time lurker on this forum. It was incredibly helpful when I was buying and selling this year.
After a turbulent year, we finally managed to sell our house and buy our new forever home.

Just as I thought the sleepless nights were over, we received a letter to our previous address that we hadn't paid stamp duty (thankfully we paid for mail forwarding otherwise we wouldn't even know!).
We had paid our conveyancers the entire amount including the stamp duty fees prior to completion. We called the conveyancers and they told us they have paid the stamp duty fees. We called HMRC and were informed we have not paid the stamp duty fees. 

We have started to be charged interest and our conveyancers are not responding.

What should we do? We absolutely have no money whatsoever to be paying anything right now. Thank you in advance.

[Deleted User]

IlikeDogs said:

I've been a long-time lurker on this forum. It was incredibly helpful when I was buying and selling this year.
After a turbulent year, we finally managed to sell our house and buy our new forever home.

Just as I thought the sleepless nights were over, we received a letter to our previous address that we hadn't paid stamp duty (thankfully we paid for mail forwarding otherwise we wouldn't even know!).
We had paid our conveyancers the entire amount including the stamp duty fees prior to completion. We called the conveyancers and they told us they have paid the stamp duty fees. We called HMRC and were informed we have not paid the stamp duty fees. 

We have started to be charged interest and our conveyancers are not responding.

What should we do? We absolutely have no money whatsoever to be paying anything right now. Thank you in advance.

Raise a formal complaint against your solicitor following the firm’s complaints procedure and escalate to the Legal Ombudsman if you aren’t happy with firm’s response to your complaint. 

Also contact HMRC and explain you paid the money to your solicitor and are following it up with them. 

SallyDucati

If you have a copy of the final statement/invoice from the conveyancer and proof that you have paid (extract from bank statement?), I would suggest contacting HMRC again with this proof and hopefully they may at least stop the interest.

The only way this is going to get fully resolved is for the conveyancer to provide proof to HMRC of when they paid it.  It may well be a glitch at HMRC end with the thousands of transactions they must get a day.

Keep on at your conveyancer too.

SDLT_Geek

I would expect that HMRC only know about the transaction because of the conveyancers having filed the "land transaction return" (LTR) assessing the tax.  Filing of the return and payment of the tax are not entirely linked and HMRC need to match up the payment received with the Unique Transaction Reference Number (UTRN) generated when the LTR is submitted.  (The UTRN is on a form SDLT5 which is generated by HMRC)

Sometimes HMRC do not match up the payment with the UTRN and the money goes into a suspense account until they allocated it.  They would then normally cancel the interest.

youth_leader

So sorry to read this, good you have your paper trail to prove the payment. 

I had complete trust in my solicitor, until a poster on here recommended checking the amounts during conveyancing.  I checked mine and discovered the solicitor had underpaid me £177.00 after my house sale, they refunded quickly but I was very surprised and will always keep track in future. 

Tiglet2

@IlikeDogs SDLT_Geek is correct.  It is very unfortunate that this has happened to you, but do query it with your conveyancer.  It is most likely that HMRC have not yet matched up the payment when the solicitor submitted the SDLT.  Sometimes it is a simple thing like a human error typo.  Don't worry, as long as you have raised this with your solicitor, they will be able to sort this out without any additional monies/interest being paid.

jimbog

Make sure it's not a scam

IlikeDogs

SallyDucati said:

If you have a copy of the final statement/invoice from the conveyancer and proof that you have paid (extract from bank statement?), I would suggest contacting HMRC again with this proof and hopefully they may at least stop the interest.

The only way this is going to get fully resolved is for the conveyancer to provide proof to HMRC of when they paid it.  It may well be a glitch at HMRC end with the thousands of transactions they must get a day.

Keep on at your conveyancer too.

Thank you for this suggestion. This is a really good idea. I'll ask HMRC for an email address to forward the copy on to. They only provided a phone number, address and a bank giro credit for us to instruct the bank to make the payment. 

Lover_of_Lycra said:

Raise a formal complaint against your solicitor following the firm’s complaints procedure and escalate to the Legal Ombudsman if you aren’t happy with firm’s response to your complaint. 

Also contact HMRC and explain you paid the money to your solicitor and are following it up with them. 

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I think we will do this if HMRC won't accept our paper trial. It sounds like they would at least be able to remove the charges.

SDLT_Geek said:

I would expect that HMRC only know about the transaction because of the conveyancers having filed the "land transaction return" (LTR) assessing the tax.  Filing of the return and payment of the tax are not entirely linked and HMRC need to match up the payment received with the Unique Transaction Reference Number (UTRN) generated when the LTR is submitted.  (The UTRN is on a form SDLT5 which is generated by HMRC)

Sometimes HMRC do not match up the payment with the UTRN and the money goes into a suspense account until they allocated it.  They would then normally cancel the interest.

Tiglet2 said:

@IlikeDogs SDLT_Geek is correct.  It is very unfortunate that this has happened to you, but do query it with your conveyancer.  It is most likely that HMRC have not yet matched up the payment when the solicitor submitted the SDLT.  Sometimes it is a simple thing like a human error typo.  Don't worry, as long as you have raised this with your solicitor, they will be able to sort this out without any additional monies/interest being paid.

It sounds like this might happen more often than one would expect. Perhaps I don't need to panic just yet! Thank you both.

youth_leader said:

So sorry to read this, good you have your paper trail to prove the payment. 

I had complete trust in my solicitor, until a poster on here recommended checking the amounts during conveyancing.  I checked mine and discovered the solicitor had underpaid me £177.00 after my house sale, they refunded quickly but I was very surprised and will always keep track in future. 

Our solicitors made errors in the final amount. We actually ended up paying our estate agents and solicitors extra (around £1000). But at the time we were so stressed we just didn't have the energy to dispute it. We were worried by disputing it we'd miss our completion date as it took them 3 days to provide the final statement. They were more expensive than most conveyancers but they had made multiple errors in our house sale and house purchase. 

jimbog said:

Make sure it's not a scam

Good shout! I just googled the number stated on the letter (which is also the one we called). It comes up on the gov.uk website.

user1977

I doubt HMRC will be interested in who has the money if it isn't them - as far as they're concerned, the penalties and interest need paying, and it's for you and your conveyancer to sort it out between themselves (unless as suggested HMRC do in fact have the money and haven't realised it). 

Mizydoscape

youth_leader said:

So sorry to read this, good you have your paper trail to prove the payment. 

I had complete trust in my solicitor, until a poster on here recommended checking the amounts during conveyancing.  I checked mine and discovered the solicitor had underpaid me £177.00 after my house sale, they refunded quickly but I was very surprised and will always keep track in future. 

Interesting you mentioned this as it looks like we were underpaid (only £42) by solicitors on the completion of a flat we sold in April.

This was only noticed as we're using this money towards our new purchase now and the completion statement doesn't match the bank transfer!

user1977

Mizydoscape said:

youth_leader said:

So sorry to read this, good you have your paper trail to prove the payment. 

I had complete trust in my solicitor, until a poster on here recommended checking the amounts during conveyancing.  I checked mine and discovered the solicitor had underpaid me £177.00 after my house sale, they refunded quickly but I was very surprised and will always keep track in future. 

Interesting you mentioned this as it looks like we were underpaid (only £42) by solicitors on the completion of a flat we sold in April.

This was only noticed as we're using this money towards our new purchase now and the completion statement doesn't match the bank transfer!

£42 is a typical amount for a Chaps fee for sending the money to you, unless that was already on the statement?