Accurately declaring interest on tax return

Dazed_and_C0nfused

eskbanker said:

dosh37 said:

I wrote to HMRC in August to explain that I had lost track of my savings income. I asked them to provide me with a statement showing the interest automatically reported to them by the building societies & banks so that I could complete my Self Assessment return. This information is supposed to be provided by savings organisations to HMRC before the end of June.

The reply I eventually received stated that they had no information.

Despite what you may read on these forums I don't believe HMRC have the resources or processes in place to cross check Self Assessment tax returns against interest actually paid out.

While it's true that BBSI returns are meant to be completed by the end of June, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is what happens in reality, and even once those submissions have been made, there's still a substantial workload for HMRC to process them and allocate them to the correct taxpayer records, so it could be true that they had no data recorded against your account in August, but a request later in the year ought to deliver a different result.

And I don't think anyone has suggested that all SA returns are cross-checked, but some will be!

Totally agree with this.

Judging by the number of account some people posting on here have it's going to take some time to match everything up at HMRC's end once the receive the information from each bank.

DRS1

dosh37 said:

I wrote to HMRC in August to explain that I had lost track of my savings income. I asked them to provide me with a statement showing the interest automatically reported to them by the building societies & banks so that I could complete my Self Assessment return. This information is supposed to be provided by savings organisations to HMRC before the end of June.

The reply I eventually received stated that they had no information.

Despite what you may read on these forums I don't believe HMRC have the resources or processes in place to cross check Self Assessment tax returns against interest actually paid out.

I used to get Simple Assessment tax demands relating to "untaxed interest" despite the fact that I paid tax through self assessment.  It annoyed me a lot until one year when the figure they quoted was higher than the figures I had recorded.  They were able to read out to me all the figures they had and sure enough there was interest on a closed account which I had missed.  The simple assessment people are not the same as the self assessment people so maybe you just asked the wrong person.  They may be able to help on the main 0300 200 3300 number (if have an hour or two to spare).