Payroll Year End and The Taxman Phones

Payroll Year End

With the tax year drawing to a close, employers will shortly be required to start preparing Employers’ Annual Returns (P35s) and P14s/P60s for all payroll schemes, in order to submit these by 19th May 2010.

These involve collating the date from monthly/weekly payroll runs into a summary per employee, as well as checking that all payments of liability have been made to HMRC. Personally, I have always found it useful to do a number of the checks and reconciliations for the Annual Return prior to running the March payroll, because then if you find any errors or discrepancies, these can be fixed within the payroll year. These issues could include: liabilities underpaid or overpaid to the Revenue; employees PAYE under or overdeducted; credit balances or online filing incentive still to be deducted from liability.

Remember that if you had less than 50 employees and filed your 08/09 return online by 19th May 2009, you will have been entitled to an incentive of £75 to be deducted from any liability due to the Revenue in 09/10.

HMRC’s online filing system is actually reasonably user friendly and takes you through all the information that is required to produce P14/P60s for each individual employee and P35 for the company. It is also possible to input the information, save, and make amendments to it, before submission.

Of course, payroll software packages such as Sage have a year end ‘wizard’ to lead you through the process.

The filing deadline is 19th May 2010, and barring a few exceptions, all employers will have to file these returns online.

If you have not yet registered for online filing, it is important to do so immediately in preparation for the 5th April 2010 year end. HMRC suggests allowing at least one week, as you need to wait for them to send out passwords. The link below gives HMRC instructions for registering.

File Online

If you would like us to prepare and submit these returns for you, or if you require any advice, please feel free to contact us.

Email

The Taxman Phones

HMRC ran over 200 staff training courses last summer relating to cold calling.

Currently, the most likely reasons for calls from HMRC would be Tax Credit claims and overdue tax payments. However, it would appear that this may be expanded to include questions about tax returns and general tax issues.

Genuine or Scam?

HMRC do not work 9-5, therefore they could be calling on evenings or weekends. How do you know if it really is HMRC?

Don’t give out your tax reference or NI number. Ask the caller to confirm at least the first few digits of either of these. If they refuse, or they get them wrong, discontinue the call.

Once you are convinced that the caller is genuine, you are still not obliged to talk to them if it is not convenient to do so. If you are not sure of the answer, simply say you will find out and get back to them.

You are within your rights to refer them to your accountant for any correspondence on the matter.