HMRC? From what little you've said your problems seem to stem from your employer.
Tax office chasing me
- Thread starter ethan
- Start date
HMRC? From what little you've said your problems seem to stem from your employer.
Soldato
- Joined
- 19 Oct 2008
- Posts
- 5,951
Best speak to them to discuss. HMRC are one of the few government agencies who will always see you as the villain
. I made a mistake years ago with a payment due to an error from my accountant (was given the wrong wrong reference code) and despite HMRC then messing up and not transferring the amount to the correct account, I was given a warning over the phone and made to feel like a naughty boy. They did at least reverse the fine but put a naughty notice against my company 
.Hopefully you can get this resolved without cost to yourself.
Gah, I hate the HMRC. My employer got my tax wrong a while ago. I realised it and tried to correct it including telling HMRC. But HMRC themselves insisted it was right. Several years later they said I had underpaid tax and wanted about £7k repaid immediately.
Soldato
Best to phone them and sort it out
Had it years ago
Employer was deducting the money but hadn't payed it to them
Then tried telling them it was nothing to do with him I was self employed according to him
Fair play to the tax office after I made an appointment and went and saw them turned out my employer was up to
All sorts of naughty stuff
In the end up I actually got a nice rebate lol
Kind of pointless any one on here advising you every ones circumstances are different
speak to the tax office about it and see what they say
Had it years ago
Employer was deducting the money but hadn't payed it to them
Then tried telling them it was nothing to do with him I was self employed according to him
Fair play to the tax office after I made an appointment and went and saw them turned out my employer was up to
All sorts of naughty stuff
In the end up I actually got a nice rebate lol
Kind of pointless any one on here advising you every ones circumstances are different
speak to the tax office about it and see what they say
Soldato
Corporations have fancy lawyers
Average guy in the street doesn't
Not fair of course but that's life
Do they?
No. Tax code was also correct. Just the one job throughout. The only change instigated around then (2016) was the introduction of the workplace pension (if I remember correctly?). Obviously I'll contact HMRC- but having to do this over and over again for the last four years -is a bit much.
Be glad that you're not in the USA and have to file a federal and state tax return every year. In the USA, employers withhold and pay the income tax that you tell them to pay, even if it's completely wrong. It's your responsibility to file your taxes correctly.
In the USA, employers withhold and pay the income tax that you tell them to pay, even if it's completely wrong. It's your responsibility to file your taxes correctly.
Soldato
- Joined
- 19 Oct 2008
- Posts
- 5,951
Wonder if it's as complicated as ours is? I guess not.Be glad that you're not in the USA and have to file a federal and state tax return every year.
Well, you've heard how little tax some of the big US Tech companies pay for example? State you're going to tax them more fairly and then Trump gets on the case threatening retaliation.
Much more so, not least because USA applies worldwide taxation on its citizens and permanent residents. If I earn money in the UK, I'm legally obliged to inform the IRS and California state tax board and pay tax on that money (if I haven't paid any tax to HRMC).
Another example is having to report every share sale, which, if you use a robot investment service like Wealthfront or Betterment, could be thousands of fractions of shares.
I’ve heard a lot, I’ve seen a lot less.
The most egregious efforts have come from individuals.
Yawn. Such a lazy argument. My job must be spinning on a chair all day.
Soldato
Absolutely. Not just multi million dollar corporations, well off business people and professionals too. Have a colleague whose friend quite being a tax inspector after it became clear what a massive discrepancy there was between how they treated the relatively poor vs the relatively well off. Cases that pushed them over the edge were:
A) old retired couple that rented out a room in their house on an informal B&B type basis, basically didn't realise they should have been paying tax (would have been very small amount of tax due to the sums involved). When told about their error they offered to repay. Inspector was told by bosses that they must be prosecuted regardless, as they had been breaking the law.
B) Professional business owner (think it was lawyer or something) had been blatantly manipulating figures and business had been underpaying 10s of thousands in tax, so inspector wanted to take them to court. Instead, they were told to come to an agreement, and it ended with the owner paying a small fraction of what they should have done, with a slap on the wrist (not even extending to a letter to their professional body).
Matches up with what other people I know have experienced, getting horrendously threatening letters completely out of the blue, being a complete presumption of guilt. No apology when it turns out they have done nothing wrong.
Neither of those sound to be a "multi-million" corporation.
I also don't believe the characterisation of B unless it happened in the 2000s or earlier or you're referring to ADR, which is intended as a method to come to an agreement, and in which case HMRC's argument was nowhere near as strong as they'd like to believe.
Feel free to come back with something more persuasive though.
Soldato
Exactly, it isn't just multi million dollar corporations. And I believe B) probably would have happened in the 2000s. From the ex-inspector's point of view the case was absolutely strong enough to go to court.
I guess I don't know that much about how they deal with multi million dollar corporations, but my perception is that a lot of what they do is actually technically legal. However its only legal in a way that isn't accessible to anyone that doesn't have a large legal department to head off questions and make sure things are set up in just the right way. I think one example was Starbucks UK, whose license fee to Starbucks for using the brand name in the UK just so happened to match up almost exactly with whatever their taxable profit would have been that year. So in those cases it's less an issue with HMRC itself, and more an issue with the tax law.
I guess I don't know that much about how they deal with multi million dollar corporations, but my perception is that a lot of what they do is actually technically legal. However its only legal in a way that isn't accessible to anyone that doesn't have a large legal department to head off questions and make sure things are set up in just the right way. I think one example was Starbucks UK, whose license fee to Starbucks for using the brand name in the UK just so happened to match up almost exactly with whatever their taxable profit would have been that year. So in those cases it's less an issue with HMRC itself, and more an issue with the tax law.
Okay, so HMRC are generally seen as pretty fair. Other European or Asian counties can be highly aggressive and often just make up their own rules. Imagine HMRC aggressively take every case to court. How much do you think that costs and how long do you think it takes? Over five years after the year under review, of not more with appeals. Every country negotiates on technical points as often cases aren’t black and white. Happy to go into detail as to why they’re not black and white (e.g. what is the arms length profit for two companies in the same group to leave in the U.K.?).
Starbucks licensing isn’t as clear as you make out either. US inbounds were abusing the rules 5+ years ago, but that has largely been challenged and international cooperation has them under tighter rules and more scrutiny.
Soldato
If HMRC are seen as fair then I can only imagine how bad those other tax ministries must be!
Well that is good if loopholes like that are a bit tighter now then. And I can well imagine that it can be far from black and white in some cases, particularly for big multinational groups - and that seems like a huge failing on the part of our leaders to me, and agree it's not really HMRC's fault. Their attitude to those that don't have expensive lawyers to defend them is their fault though.
I can well imagine that it would cost a huge amount to take every big company to court and it would take ages, but that doesn't mean they won't threaten the little guy with it! I know a couple of people who have had horrifically threatening letters from hmrc demanding X £s or else they'll be taken to court, on what turned out to be completely incorrect information. There's clearly a cultural problem at the very least of they think its acceptable just to threaten people out of nowhere based on completely false information.
That seems like a big problem to me, that big multinationals may get away with things because it's complicated, or it would be really expensive and time consuming to prosecute them, meanwhile an ordinary citizen or sole trader will get threatened with court at the first opportunity, regardless of whether there's any actual evidence of wrongdoing.
To be honest, aside from some cases of incompetence which seems to be more down to an individual employee than the organisation as a whole, what I have experienced of them seems fair to me though that is a bit of a change compared to a few years back.
For instance I know a couple of people (who own or rather owned their own business) who tried to mess about with their taxes, etc. and fell foul of them and were given very reasonable terms, surprisingly so IMO, to make the situation right... sadly in one case they thought they were too clever and in the other too stubborn and ended up in a much worse situation. In both cases HMRC had them bang to rights and could have bent them over from the start but didn't so I was facepalming hard seeing the path they were taking in both cases.