I am a PAYE drone with no fancy investments or rental income, no extra income at all***** not a paper-round, nothing. I can’t find anything in the Tax Return form to fill in. They even have my name and address right so there’s nothing to do there.
Can I just sign it and send it back blank?
Why on earth did they send me this.
Thanks in advance for any advice/sympathy.
*****There’s about 12p interest from an abandoned savings account but I’m told that has already had tax deducted.
There should be some “employment” pages, in which you should fill in your PAYE stuff*. At some point your employer ought to have given you a P60 form which tells you how much tax you’ve paid in that employment. You can transfer the numbers onto the form. For the bank interest pages, it’d be helpful if you had the exact figures for the savings account so you could fill them in.
*that is, if you really should’ve been sent the form in the first place. It’s worth phoning the Inland Revenue to ask them what’s up. Prepare to be on hold for a bit, as the quasi-deadline of Sep 30 is approaching. I say quasi-deadline because it’s the date by which you need to send them the form to guarantee that they’ll work out the tax for you. You can still send the form in after that date.
Your local Citizen’s Advice Bureau can give some basic advice for free - such as whether you really should have been sent the form, if the Inland Revenue aren’t forthcoming about it.
Ah-ha! I fought my form blindness and found it on page 11 (or in normal life it would be page 11 since this is TaxLand it’s page “E1”) looks like I just copy the numbers from my P60 (which miraculously I have to hand) and fill in some expenses stuff. What I missed was I was supposed to answer ‘Yes’ to Q1 on page 2 which when you get to page 11 (sorry “E1”) at the top it says “if you have answered ‘Yes’ to question 1. . .”
Why is the normal employment stuff on the very last pages, after ::deep breath:: savings/investments/pensions/reliefs/allowances/student-loans/repayments, and refunds?
I just filled mine in (a great achievement, since for the last 6 years I’ve left it so late I had to hand it in by hand - i.e. January 30th).
It sounds like yours will be fairly simple, but you may havet a few more boxes to fill in if - like me - you have a pension, or have any job-related benefits (health etc), or if you claim expenses back from your employers (i.e. you journey to city X and claim the train fair back). In the last case you should get a P11D - I think - and like the P60, you just copy the numbers across to the relevant boxes.
In fairness, there was one year I got into a right state with the form - managed to screw it up royally. The IRS people were amongst the most polite and helpful of all customer-facing droids I’ve ever dealt with.
I was still getting Tax Returns whilst living in US. I phoned the Tax Office, and eventually got hold of someone with authority who could cancel the need for me to fill out the return. I litterally had nothing to put on the return other than a few pounds of building society interest. So maybe if there really is nothing for you to put on the form you could phone up and they might cancel your need to fill out the form. I agree with Xerxes about the IRS being pretty good helping you out on the phone.
And I’m clueless.