‘Fair’s fair’ when it comes to legitimate tax return mistakes; as HMRC acknowledge their lack of availability.
Late self assessment tax return penalties have been issued to people who have tried to contact HMRC about their 2014/2015 tax year return – but couldn’t get through.
HMRC not answering the phone
A huge number of taxpayers were left utterly frustrated by their inability to get the advice they needed from HMRC while they were completing their tax returns. This, rather unsurprisingly, led to a massive number of legitimate mistakes. Most infuriatingly for the taxpayer, despite a lack of access to the necessary information, the matching fines for such mistakes were still issued by HMRC.
The SA penalties
It’s not a small consideration, a fine for ‘carelessness’ could amount to 30% of your total tax bill. It’s £100 just for missing the Self Assessment deadline and, after 3 months of not settling what you owe, you start accumulating fines at a rate of £10 per day. In the last tax year 15,000 tax returns were concluded to contain “deliberate” mistakes and 90,000 “careless or otherwise not deliberate”.
HMRC under resourced.
HMRC needs help. Several recent reports have exposed the extent of HMRC’s struggle to meet taxpayers’ demands for help. Official figures point to 12 million calls simply not answered and condemns their customer service as “abysmal”. But HMRC are now acknowledging their responsibility by cancelling or reducing those fines, if you did try to get in touch for advice but were unable to get through. The Telegraph reported that HMRC had cancelled the penalty for thousands of people with a “reasonable excuse” for being late.
An HMRC spokesperson stated: “We work very much on a case -by-case basis but if you phoned us and couldn’t get through we would take that into account. If someone says they tried to call us we will take their word for it. We do not want to penalise anyone.”
“We know our customer service hasn’t been as good as it should be so we have moved a further 3,000 people into them and things are getting better. All this means no one should get a penalty for missing the 31 January deadline, or for putting the wrong figures in their returns because of call waiting times. A penalty for a return that was in on time would only apply for failing to take sufficient care to get it right.”
