Today I received a nice letter from HRM Revenue & Customs (yet another site that doesn’t work without being prefixed with “www”). It states:
Notice of determination of penalty for a late Tax Return for the tax year ended 5 April 2007.
I did not receive your Tax Return by the due date so you are liable to a penalty.
Oh how nice! Upon reading further I found out the following information:
As a result the penalty imposed on you under Secxtion 93(2) of the Taxes Management Act 1970 is £100.00
This “fine” comes to around $217 Australian. Happy Easter eh!?
But wait, there’s more!
If you want to appeal you must do so:
- in writing, and
- within 30 days of the date of this Notice
See if you can guess what the “date of notice” is? Wait for it…. Date 19 FEBRUARY 2008
Awesome! So I’ve already missed the deadline to whinge about it, purely because I’m on the other side of the planet. I wonder what it means for me now that I have missed the deadline…
Penalites for late Tax Returns
- A penalty of £100 is imposed automatically if the Tax Return has not been received by the due date.
- A further £100 penalty is imposed automatically if the Tax Return has still not been received 6 months later.
- Further penalties up to a maximum of £60 a day can also be imposed.
- If the Tax Return is more than 12 months late there can be a penalty up to the amount of tax payable for the year.
So I could be up for some serious fines then! Awesome, just what I wanted to hear.
By now you’re probably wondering why I’m blogging about this. Well the answer is simple. Before you read on you need to bear in mind the following:
- The U.K. Tax Year goes from the beginning of April, through to the end of March the following year.
- This notice is stating that I’m being fined for not submitting a Tax Return for the tax year that ended April 2007 - which means it’s for the tax year of 5th April 2006, to the 4th April 2007
Amy and I flew back to Australia on March 24th 2006. I stopped work in the U.K. on the 3rd March 2006. I had a Tax Return done for the last year I was there while I was at home. How the f*** can I possibly be in need to submit a Tax Return for a tax year that I had absolutely nothing to do with!??! I wasn’t even in the country! Now I have the fun job of chasing it up from the other side of the planet, which will no doubt take ages due to the “efficiency” of the U.K. Government workers. What a joke.
March 20, 2008
Ouch, sounds like it’ll be a right pain in the arse to sort out.
I was paying more tax than I should have for years without knowing. It was only when Katherine put her beady eye over one of my payslips that I found out my tax code was wrong. After being passed around on the phone from one department to another, I had to dig out 4 years worth of P60 forms (luckily I archived them!) and sent em off. It took about 2 months to get my money back, though they kept the interest they’d earned on it.
March 21, 2008
Isn’t it amazing how the Tax Office manage to find you and hunt you down if your tax code is wrong and they’re in the negative, yet when they’re in the positive it’s up to you to let them know?! Total bastards.
I hope you didn’t lose out too much mate.
As for me, I decided to call HRM last night. I told them the situation and they said they’d have to investigate and call me back. Thankfully they didn’t leave it until the middle of the night to get back to me. Apparently I needed to do a tax return because I’d done one the year before (wtf?). Sounds f**king stupid to me. Anyway, all I have to do is wait for the forms to arrive, fill it out with zeros everywhere, state that I didn’t work in the UK for that financial year and it should all just go away.
Why they can’t take that info over the phone is beyond me.
March 28, 2008
If the entire government went screaming over a cliff chained to the seats of a bus, people would only care or notice if the two seats in the back were empty. That would be a misappropriation of our revenues, for certain. Otherwise it’d be six months before anybody pointed out they had not been around for a half a year. You’d never miss’em but you’d keep the money you earn, which would make the world a much happier and less frustrating place to live.