High Income Child Benefit Charge

Get your partner to opt out of receiving the child benefit officially - she will still receive NI credits. Then you can concentrate on paying off your debt without racking up more with HMRC. The only pro in continuing to receive it is temporarily having a bit more money (in your partner's account)!

Sorry to resurrect this thread but I too have now received a letter from HMRC and interestingly enough it starts with "A lot of our customers have told us that they do not know about the high income child benefit charge............."

So according to some in this thread there are a lot of inept people......hmmmmmm. I usually use the analogy that if a lot of students in a class fail the exams don't immediately judge the students, maybe question the lecturer's technique or the college !

It looks like I dipped over the 50K mark twice in the last couple of years. I consider myself fairly astute in most matters like this but it has caught me out too. Ironically enough I have spent the last year trying to get registered for self assessment for my own purposes in order to address some tax relief (I've always been on PAYE but a specific issue has cropped up) and by the HMRC's own admission "their system" has been the issue as I used to self assess many many years ago and it can't cope very well with trying to reinstate someone. We have eventually got to the stage I can now self assess but now I get this darn letter.

Even then the letter is confusing - it states "You have to pay the charge if: .... your income is higher than your spouse or partners income". What a ridiculous statement ! What if my spouse earns £10k and I earn £11k - according to this I now need to pay the charge. I can only imagine this so called high profile campaign many years ago was just as poorly worded or thought out.

Anyhow - off I go to do battle with HMRC. I only just dipped over the £50k in 2017 and 2018 and part of that was to do with getting back pay in one year for the previous year when I changed jobs just before the tax year end so it was all quite complicated and when you are under PAYE there are lots of circumstances you are at the mercy of and not always in control of the timing. I only hope HRMC have some grasp of life in the real world.

inapina wrote: »

My base salary was below the 50k threshold, but I worked a load of overtime (busy period!), and earned about another 8k gross, which put me into the >50k bracket in 2014-15. The whole child allowance thing never entered my head, and, like others have said, nothing has ever come from HMRC to prompt me into thinking about being in a higher bracket, even though they must know. What really annoys me is that, as a 40% taxpayer, the Govt got a full 40% of the extra 8K, so an extra 3.2k that they would not have had ordinarily, from MY hard work, and now they want a further 1.5k in backdated child benefits repaid, plus a fine, on top of all this. It's no wonder people are angry. Earning over 50k isn't even enough to get a mortgage on a cheap house where I live and my wife earns next to nothing, so I support us both. I also adopted my 2 children, saving the Govt the cost of raising them in care for 16 years, which would have cost them a couple of million all told. I'm just so angry at the greed and ignorance of HMRC, and the lack of joined-up thinking in implementing the tax system. Why not reduce or stop paying the Child Support at the time? And as the CB goes to my wife, I can't even talk to them about it, even though we're still married and they;re coming after ME for the money! Angry about all this!!

An old post, I know, but I do feel for these guys in this situation. Working overtime to earn some more money and a chunk gets taken off your child benefits for it. Whereas if you didn't do the overtime, you'd be fine. I'm not saying they should 'get away with it', but that system is just messed up. £50k for a family of 4 is far from end of the rainbow stuff too.

If you don't actually file self assessment then actually do it for yourself. It could save a slip up down the line & them coming back with a fine/penalty.