r/TaxUK

Hi there,
I’m a self employed delivery driver and have been VAT registered since November. At the time of registration I was proactively taking the right steps, and contacted my supervisor on who to send my tax details and they sent me the wrong email address.

Fast forward to now, since that time I have not been getting paid + VAT on my invoices and HMRC are still expecting the liability from me. The company are refusing to backdate the supplementary VAT on my invoices, even though all other DSPs allow this and it would be net neutral for them.

Is there any way I can resolve this? As it stands I’m set to lose up to 20% of my earnings.

Any help would be much appreciated, TIA

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice on applying split year treatment as I return to the UK after being a non resident for the past six years.

I believe I fall under Case 4 (starting to have a home in the UK), as I will be re-establishing a permanent base in the UK and will also no longer have a overseas home available from my move date back to the UK.

Upon returning, I will initially be staying in temporary accommodation with family, before returning to the UAE for a couple of weeks to finalise my move, and then moving into a new rented property in the UK.

My question is: for the purposes of Case 4, does split year treatment commence from the date I physically return to the UK, or from the date I establish a settled home (i.e. when I move into the rented property) a couple of weeks later?

Thank you in advance!

Just wondering if anyone has received there refund yet from HMRC for PAYE as I thought I would have heard by now.

Gets a letter every April. Look at the code. Nod. File it. Never actually verified whether it is correct. Recently found out mine had been wrong for two years and I was owed money back. How do you actually check it is right and how common is it for them to just be quietly wrong?

How and will they get found out? It’s so unfair!!

Is this normal !? I sent in my capital losses via post to HRMC in December 2025, on the government gateway website i can see that both my submissions have been logged and the status says “ in progress”

Its 19th May 2026 !?

The cheek of it is that HRMC have now swnt me 2 reminders ro complete my self assessment for 25-26

During the 23/24 tax year I got some money that my grandad had invested.

He had put in ~£30000 and it had increased to ~£41000. It was offshore (Ireland) and at the time I did my self assessment (first time doing a self assessment) I thought it was capital gains I needed to pay on the ~£11k increase because it was an increase in investment.

I got a letter saying that HMRC thought I hadn’t declared offshore income and after some back and forth where I explained I had put it in the capital gains section they said it should be in income tax and I need to make a disclosure.

What I don’t know is which box I should tick in self-assessing behaviour & the impact this will have on the penalty I pay. I am tempted to say “submitted an inaccurate return despite taking reasonable care” because I did do my best to submit it correctly, but if they decide I have “not taken reasonable care” will I then face a higher penalty?

I’m also not sure what the penalty would be because it varies from 0% to 200% depending which compliance check fact sheet I read.

And will I ever get back the tax I paid as capital gains from when I did the self assessment, or do I have to pay both because I submitted it wrong?

Hi in 24-25 I was working for my brother unofficially for his company (I.E no contract, irregular hours and paid via bank transfer not PAYE through HMRC).

I have now been offered a role for a major bank and they are completing extensive employment checks. I earnt slightly more than the tax threshold at the time but to be frank, I just assumed HMRC would contact me about it because when I calculated it, it was about £64.

However my new job are asking about the 14 months of employment I had but why there are no records.

Unfortunately I am no longer in contact with my brother at all and an unsure on how to best deal with the scenario.

In this instance, would I need to submit a self assessment for that 2024-2025 period showing that I earnt X amount during this time, which I can evidence via bank transfers made to me.

This would then mean HMRC would now have records that would satisfy the checks my new job are conducting.

Any help would be appreciated.

Huge deadline problem here.

I've been slowly taking on a few more small business clients this year and most of them are still on messy Excel books, so I started looking into MTD VAT bridging software to avoid manually reworking everything just for HMRC submissions. Tried setting things up for one client last week but got a bit stuck on how the mapping works between spreadsheet columns and the final VAT return boxes, especially when transactions aren’t perfectly structured..

Also not sure what people actually do when errors pop up right before submission, do u fix the sheet first or retry the upload through the bridge? feels like there’s not much room for mistakes once you’re close to deadline ..

Anyone got a setup that actually feels reliable for this kind of workflow or is it just something you get used to over time??

Need help, thanks all..

Need some advice please because I’m not getting to the bottom of it with my agency, and I’m worried I’m not going to get my money back.

I work for a local authority through an agency but they have nothing to do with payroll - the agency handles all pay through approved timesheets. All timesheets were submitted and approved on time.

For my first 9 weekly pay periods, around £700-£800 income tax was deducted each week from my payslips. However, HMRC/Government Gateway only showed ONE of those weeks reported, that being the last week of the 9 week period…

Example of Wk9:
- Payslip:
- Gross: ~£2.4k
- Tax deducted: ~£818
- NI: ~£87
- HMRC / Gov Gateway for same week:
- Same gross
- Tax showing: ~£336
- Same NI

So the NI matches perfectly, but the income tax doesn’t.

HMRC also confirmed my employment start date was submitted around 2 months late, which explains why the earlier weeks are missing entirely from their system.

The agency keeps saying:
- my net pay is “correct”
- the missing amount belongs to HMRC, not me
- once they upload the historic weeks, everything will reconcile

But I cannot get a straight answer to the actual question:

If they deducted c.£818 from me, but HMRC only received/shows c.£336 for that week, where is the remaining c.£482 currently sitting?

What’s making me more uncomfortable is:
- all pay AFTER those first 9 weeks suddenly became correct
- HMRC and payslips now match exactly
- communication has been awful for nearly a month since raising this
- they aren’t being forthcoming with historic payslips, information or status updates
- HMRC told me they cannot refund money they never received

I’ve worked in finance/accounting for 8 years and every payroll I’ve ever had has matched Government Gateway penny for penny, which is why this feels so wrong to me.

I also understood it to be a legal requirement that what is reported to HMRC matches the payslip figures. So if the original payslips were wrong, surely they would need corrected payslips and corrected RTI submissions rather than just saying “it’ll reconcile later”?

At this point I’m convinced HMRC don’t owe me this money because they don’t actually have it. In addition to HMRC agreeing with me on the basis of the salary, calculations and information provided.

Has anyone dealt with something similar with PAYE/RTI/payroll corrections? Especially through agencies?

In my situation - please can you advise what I am best placed to do? Do you believe the money is with HMRC or the agency?

Thank you

I retired about six years ago and have been living on my local government pension and drawing an amount from Royal London pension pot. I am taxed on the LG pension and take £1000 a month from my RL pot - £250 tax free and the rest taxed at 20% (£850 in total). I'm also using part of my wife's tax allowance as she doesn't yet pay tax. I started getting my state pension last December and I assumed that my LG pension would be reduced as that would soak up my tax allowance but that hasn't happened. According to my calculations my LG pension should be about £200 lower. When I looked yesterday at the HMRC website at my PAYE it showed that they added my pension in December and then took it off the calculations in January. What's going on?

I have a small Ltd and I'm the only person working and only director. I make around £1500/month. How much can I pay myself as salary? Also, can I pay myself dividents every month? If so, how much? Sorry if I'm asking silly questions but I have no clue on how all this works. Thank you!!

I'm moving back to the UK after 7 years abroad. I will have some self-employment income during the tax year and would like to declare it and pay the tax on it in the UK.

I'm a bit concerned as to what information they will ask for to prove I was abroad for the past 7 years. As I was not self-employed when I left, and I also wasn't employed.

I have: Bank Statements (showing I made payments abroad), Visas, Passport Stamps, Flight Tickets, and Property (in my wife's name). Is this normally sufficient?

A bit of context.

In 2010 we bought out the equity release my parents had on their house meaning the property transferred to us at the cost of the equity release settlement.

The house value back then was around £140k but the house was gifted to us at the equity release cost..

We paid 60k to pay off the equity release and then own the house rather than letting it end up in the hands of the company and keeping it in the family.

So it is registered as sold for 60k on the land registry.

It was back then occupied by my grandmother in the main house and my parents in a self contained annex.

Our original intention was to move into the house at some point when anything happened to my gran.

My gran passed away in 2021 and 2 years later after renovating it and only having recently moved into our current new home also in 2021 we decided to rent out her side of the house while my parents continued to live in their self contained section.

Currently we have a tennant still in the main part of the house, but my dad passed away in February and my mum is now in hospital and probably going into full time care with dementia.

As we now don't really want to go live there now they're gone, we are looking at options to possibly sell the whole thing and stay in our current house.

My question is how will the CGT be calculated.

The house had a value of around 140k when we bought it for 60k and is worth around 200k now.

But as per the land registry we paid 60k for it as the remainder was gifted to us on the provisor that my parents would live there rent free until they pass (Dad) or have to leave (Mum going onto care)

So do we pay it on the difference between 60k and 200k.

Or between it's market value of 140k and 200k.

It has been a family home since the early 80s owned by my Gran and Grandad, Grandad passed away mid 80s and she then passed it on to mum and dad when they moved in to take care of her.

The whole CGT thing on our family house feels wrong but we just need to know which route to take.

Any advice is most welcome.

Thank you

Dean

Just moved things around financially and looking for a decent accountant in Wimbledon for small business / personal tax stuff.

Ideally someone local who’s easy to deal with, explains things properly, and doesn’t overcomplicate everything with jargon. Mainly need help staying on top of bookkeeping and making sure tax stuff is done properly.

I’m trying to figure out the most tax-efficient way to invest my monthly surplus given my situation.

Current situation

Salary: £145k (tech)
Cash ISA: £37k
Stocks & Shares ISA: £13k (~80% vanguard ETFs ~20% in Micron Technology and VanEck Semiconductor ETF)
Premium Bonds: £30k

Lifestyle / plans

Renting in London with my partner, but most of the rent is effectively covered by income from another property in my home country, so my living costs are relatively low.

Planning to leave the UK in around 10 years and retire abroad, now 35 years old. Targeting FIRE within roughly 10 years.

Question

I can comfortably max out my ISA allowance every year, but I’m less convinced about heavily contributing to a pension mainly becauseI want access to funds before pension age and I do not plan on retiring in the uk.

Locking money away for decades feels less attractive for my situation. Given this, what’s the most tax-efficient way to invest additional monthly earnings after maxing the ISA?

GIA?
Pension anyway?
Gilts?
Buying London property?
Something else I should consider as a UK higher-rate taxpayer planning to emigrate?

Given the conditions of the current housing market would it make sense to invest in property anyway or is it better to look at other alternatives?

Any advice would be hugely appreciated

I have quite a few shares that were issued through a company incentive scheme, I’m no longer with the company and the company actually stopped the share scheme before I’d left. We were always told any shares we bought were tax free after 2 years and the matched ones after 3 years, I’ve owned these for a lot longer and would now like to sell. I’m currently retired and living off savings so not a tax payer currently, I’m looking to sell around £40k of my shares and wondered if I’d pay CGT on them.

Good Morning.

I am about to retire to Cyprus, I have purchased a property which will be my home for the majority of the year, just excluding holidays, which will not be spent in the UK.

I have not yet sold my UK property but it is on the market and will remain so until it sells.

I don't intend to rent my UK property out and it will be left unfurnished so I don't intend to return to stay in it even on a temporary basis.

My question is regarding the statutory residence test, is the UK property going to stop me from stopping being a UK tax resident until it is sold?

Will the UK property be seen as a UK tie.

Thanks

Possibly a very stupid question with a simple answer but im stumped until I can ring HMRC tomorrow.

Ive sold my rental property and worked out my CGT bill and now im trying to report and pay it through the tax website.

I log in via my gateway but it then directs me down the path of registering as a trust, which im not.

If I say im not a trust it says I pay coronation tax, which seems wrong too.

Am I being a bit thick?

Many thanks.