Tax Return fines – how does £10 per day sound?
George Osborne has his calculator out. 500,000 people who are yet to file their 2011/12 Tax Return. From Wednesday 1 May 2013 they will start getting hit with penalties of £10 per day! Yes – per day. Well the Coalition needs to get money from somewhere.
Are you one of them? If so you need to act quickly to file your Return online. If you can’t face it then have someone help you.
By the way don’t make the mistake of filing a paper return. The deadline to do that was 31 October 2012. Filing on paper now means you leave yourself liable to £900 in daily penalties.
Let me explain.
- Miss a filing deadline and there is a £100 fine.
- File your return more than 3 months after the deadline and you are liable to £10 per day in flat penalties. That’s for every day over the 3 months.
- The deadline for paper filing was 31 October 2012, so 3 months late meant 31 January 2013.
- File a paper form after 30 April 2013 and you are a full 6 months late leaving you 90 x £10 in penalties.
- On the other hand the deadline for online filing was 31 January 2013 so 3 months late means 30 April 2013.
- File the 2011/12 return online on 1 May 2013 and you are liable to one daily penalty of £10. Procrastinate until 30 May and the fines are 30 x £10 = £300, and so on up to £900.
In the old days many of these Self Assessment penalties would go away once you filed your Return and there was no tax actually due. No more.
Now if you get hit with these penalties they stick – even if in the end you have no tax bill. So move Heaven and Earth to get that 2011/12 Tax Return filed soon – very soon.
If you don’t have (or cannot find) the User ID and password needed to file online, we have software which will let us do it for you – within a day or two.
Adrian Huston, a former tax inspector, is a director of Belfast tax and accountancy firm Huston & Co – www.huston.co.uk or 028 9080 6080.