Tax demands - check your records before you agree advises MSP

Published 8 Sep 2010 10:30

As the first notices from HM Revenue & Customs of underpaid tax are delivered, SNP MSP for the South of Scotland Alasdair Morgan advised recipients to check their own records carefully before accepting HMRC’s decision.

If HMRC was provided with all the necessary information needed to correctly attribute a tax code, it should have used this within 12 months of the end of the tax year in which it was received to claw back the full amount of money. If HMRC fails to meet that deadline taxpayers can ask for the unpaid tax to be written off through an “ Extra Statutory Concession ” or ESC A19.

Mr Morgan said:

“I would advise anyone who receives a notice of underpaid income tax from HMRC to check their own records before they accept the decision. If you have given all the information necessary for a correct tax code to be awarded, the tax man only has 12 months from the end of that tax year to claw back any unpaid tax.

“If you can prove that you supplied all the necessary information and more than 12 months have passed since the end of the tax year in which you gave HMRC, then you should request that they write off the amount in question.

“This is not to suggest that people shouldn’t pay the tax they are liable to pay. However I think that anybody who has done what they can to keep HMRC notified of changes in their circumstances is entitled to question the current clawback.

“It is one thing to expect people to pay the tax they are due when they are receiving the income; that after all is the while purpose of PAYE It is quite another to expect people who have spent the money and had no reason to think that they couldn’t, to then have to pay it back, particularly in these current times of pay freezes and pay cuts.”

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