A firm of accountants has noted this morning that:
As many as 120,000 parents of middle-class families are set to be hit by fines of £100 from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for failing to repay their child benefit.
Parents that fail to register for Self-Assessment and complete an online form to repay the child benefit received in the 2012/13 tax year by 31st January 2014 will be hit with an automatic £100 penalty.
Additional penalties could be applied to those who fail to act, reaching as much as £1,600 for those who file more than 12 months late.
I fully support the imposition of penalties for tax returns submitted late.
I also think anyone paying them is pretty stupid.
Please get your tax return done on time. And please don't ask me to do it - I don't take on new personal clients.
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I do hope this doesn’t mean I will get done for claiming for my over 50’s children.
That is top notch! Ice cold!
You could always refer them to me Richard; I could use the extra bookkeeping work and the money 😉
However you are right that there is no need to be late; I submitted mine in April because I need to keep good records as a self employed bookkeeper and also for family tax credit claims
Now why isn’t this same zeal and due diligence applied to all the corporations/bankersters and the thousands of 1%’s that year after year are rarely investigated let alone fined for tax havens and spurious accounting ploys. If corporate taxes were paid based on proved documents tying revenue directly to the country claimed, no business could ever submit claims of zero taxes owed. Not, that is, unless they had exerted their influence over governments to make what should be illegal, legal. Ordinary taxpayers pay taxes after subsidizing billions for corporations in every way shape and form. They pay for services, they pay for polluters,they pay for disasters, it just never ends. And soon under bilateral trade deals, taxpayers will have to guarantee profits for foreign investors. This globalizing take over of governments to privatize all public institutions appears to be the last and most lucrative so-called ‘market’ left. Maybe corporations should simply be as they say they ‘entities unto themselves’ and leave taxpayer/citizens to separate and expand locally.
Hello This is actually a comment for the On the Middle Class article, Dec 23rd a bit late. I am trying to understand taxation but it is not my field. I am confused even looking at the source where the 27% comes from. I can see where Gary got the 34% from (Table 2.4)(where he contradicted the findings) For those of us who struggle and are a bit woolly headed can someone be specific and say which table or how the 27% was reached please? Presumably when it says the 10th of ‘households’ with the highest incomes it means couples and families and singles, an average figure for all types of household.
I am also editing the website Help me investigate welfare and would like to get my head around how equitable or otherwise is tax, as the commentators seem to be arguing about. Thanks very very much even an email reply would be handy. Carol
You are only looking at income tax
The authors referred to tax as a whole
Where is the figure – is it collated from different tables?
ONS household data
Not HMRC data
And remember that you can still get help with your tax return at the network of HMRC enquiry centres all around the country.
Check when it is open first. The Government is already saving money by closing them some days. Don’t be fobbed off with the telephone or internet. The staff there will be happy to help if you insist, but they have to follow instructions to try to push you to other channels first.
This year the coalition intends to complete the destruction of HMRC’s service to the public by closing every last one of the Department’s Enquiry centres. Nobody will be able to visit HMRC to ask for help at all.
After that the first point of call for face to face help about tax will be your MP. I’m sure they will be able to claim enough additional expenses to deal with the demand.
Eer, you had better warn people that when submitting their Returns for the first time
probably, those little bits of investment income never previously needed to be reported and so taxed, may now put them into, or further into, higher rate tax……………..
“Parents that fail to register for Self-Assessment and complete an online form to repay the child benefit received in the 2012/13 tax year by 31st January 2014 will be hit with an automatic £100 penalty”
If someone had ‘failed to register’ for Self assessment they would be fined under the failure to notify penalties regime of FA 2008 Sch 41 not the late filing penalties regime. The penalty would be based on a percentage of the ‘potential lost revenue’ and not a fixed amount. In fact, someone who hasn’t registered by now has already committed the offence and any penalty would be based on tax unpaid on the due date.