Self assessment question

MIZZ12

Hi, 
I am employed so all my work earnings are taxed through PAYE which is fine.  However, I have got to the stage where I am having to declare dividend income and interest received each year which is over the respective allowances, although below the materiality threshold for completing a self assessment per the gov.uk website.  My quandary is that HMRC don't make it easy for me to provide info for the tax year just finished ie 2023/24 in this case.  When I log onto my personal tax account there is no option to provide them with information on missing income for the 23/24 tax year, which I think is ridiculous as this is the year they will be calculating tax liability currently.
So now the only way I can do it is either by old fashioned letter [end up having to phone anyway to chase up after months of no response] or by phoning them which takes ages to speak to someone and then you have to hope that you get a helpful advisor!  Tried calling HMRC today and after speaking to the robot lady she said she couldn't help me today and hung up !! Lol
To save me from this hassle, am trying to work out if it would be a better option to start doing self assessments just to advise of the untaxed bank interest and dividends received - might be easier?  Is this the right thing to do in this situation or will there be more confusion because of my PAYE earnings or some other factor I don't even know about?  I would ask a Tax advisor but like I say I had no luck getting through on the phone today after multiple attempts.  Thank you in advance!

Bookworm105

nothing at all stops you from doing a tax return voluntarily

Albermarle

Bookworm105 said:

nothing at all stops you from doing a tax return voluntarily

I can only say that from my own experience I was told to stop doing self assessment. ( as HMRC are wanting less people to do SA and do more with their personal tax account)  As at the time I still preferred to do SA ( to see the immediate calculation) so ignored the instruction, and tried to do one but was blocked.
Also from the HMRC self assessment manual .

Where you receive a voluntary return or information which purports to be a return you should in

• Employment, pension or social security income cases

• Consider whether the liability can be dealt with through PAYE or Simple Assessment. If you think the case is not appropriate to SA you should not set up or re-activate an SA record until you have clarified the position with the customer or agent.

I understand that by another route, you can force the issue and do an SA even when HMRC prefer that you do not, but not sure how. 

mybestattempt

There's nothing in the legislation which prohibits making a self assessment return.

HMRC can decide not to issue a notice to file a return but if an unsolicited return is submitted it must be treated as though a notice had been issued.

The guidance quoted above isn't legislation it's a procedure to try avoid putting taxpayers into SA if other methods can potentially deal with attempting to meet tax liability where there is employment income for instance coding adjustments and dealing with any over/underpayments by simple assessment.

In any event, the procedure involves clarifying the position with the taxpayer.

Bookworm105

Albermarle said:

Bookworm105 said:

nothing at all stops you from doing a tax return voluntarily

I can only say that from my own experience I was told to stop doing self assessment. ( as HMRC are wanting less people to do SA and do more with their personal tax account)  As at the time I still preferred to do SA ( to see the immediate calculation) so ignored the instruction, and tried to do one but was blocked.
Also from the HMRC self assessment manual .

Where you receive a voluntary return or information which purports to be a return you should in

• Employment, pension or social security income cases

• Consider whether the liability can be dealt with through PAYE or Simple Assessment. If you think the case is not appropriate to SA you should not set up or re-activate an SA record until you have clarified the position with the customer or agent.

I understand that by another route, you can force the issue and do an SA even when HMRC prefer that you do not, but not sure how. 

what I said was there is nothing stopping you doing a return,
what HMRC do with it is a different question 

Op is trying to force a response from HMRC, a voluntary tax return is one way to do that 

Albermarle

In my case I was definitely blocked from doing one on line, after many years of submitting them that way.
Maybe as the OP has not submitted one before, it will let them at least submit one, which may or may not get the result they want.
Not sure what would happen if the OP ( or me) requested a paper one to fill in.

sheramber

If the return is logged as post, the same as other post, it won’t be dealt with any quicker.