savings income below 10k, how taxed?

I don't think there is any magic in the 10k figure. Is that the gross amount of investment income which you *currently* receive? If so, I presume that they will have adjusted your code in order to collect the additional 20% through the PAYE system. Is there any evidence of this on your Notice of Coding?

If that *is* the case, it will only collect the right amount of tax if your investment income stays constant, and you will need to tell them if it goes up *or* down.

No my investment income is much less than £10k. Also, I always pay my tax bill when due, rather than having it knocked off my tax code.

This might be it. Thedy might set my next tax code based on the last filed savings income. It does seem a strange was to proceed. There cannot be many dividend/savings incomes that are constant so the method must usually be in error.

Robert

Are you sure there isn't a decimal point somewhere in there ?

Well spotted! If you don't have to complete a tax return, you are by law

obliged to inform them of any income which is either untaxed, or taxed at a rate less than your highest rate. So if you're a 40% tax payer, you

would have to declare all income taxed at 20% or less.

I assume that the £10 (presumably) limit is because below that amount,

it just isn't worth them chasing it up, as the most they could claim would be £2, which would be less than their expenses. Even less if you

round your income down to the nearest £, which you are entitled to do.

Pray that they continue not to require you to complete a tax return, because once they do, it's hard to get them to stop!

Ha!

If you're unlucky, the sequence goes: Week 1: Don't bother filling in a tax return :-) Week 2: Here, we owe you money, have a refund cheque :-)) Week 3: Please send us a tax return in future :-(

Coincidence?

rgds, Alan

it really does say £10,000 not £10. It also says I must ask for a form if my income is over £100,000 PA. But these are the limits at which I must ask for a tax retuirn even if I don't think I have any more tax to pay. (I don't reach either of these limits BTW!)

It seems clear that I have to tell them if my savings income varies from year to year; they don't have some 'other way' of updating and correcting my tax code. What I find strange is that they could imagine that my savings income will be constant. Given that it has fluctuated every year up to now.

Thanks for the contriubutions folks,

Robert

I don't understand why you deploy the smiley/frowny faces the way you do, nor why you use the word "unlucky". It's not as though filling in a tax return were a particularly disagreeable activity [even though it was reported in the press not so long ago that many MPs found it too difficult and had to get their accountants to do it for them -- talk of the country being run by idiots].

Ideally *everyone* should do it [fill in a tax return, not run the country] every year as a matter of course. It's a damned stupid setup to have some people not doing it.

Why? If standard-rate taxpayers' affairs are straightforward - and they don't have lots of capital gains, etc., the PAYE system makes a perfectly adequate job of extracting more or less the right amount of tax.

For one thing, why settle for "more or less the right amount"? For another, filling in a tax return is a useful way of getting the taxpayer to make formal declaration of the fact that he has no undeclared "on the side" earnings, for instance, or isn't carrying on a roaring trade flogging mail order condoms on Ebay. It also has the advantage that, should their tax affairs get more complicated one day, the prospect of supplying the additional information required will seem less daunting, since they'll already be familiar with all the questions that will be asked.

Are you writing from the point of view of the IR or as an individual taxpayer?

From the IR's point of view, getting it right within a few pounds is infinitely preferable to having the costs of processing millions of additional returns.

From an individual point of view, the PAYE system usually errs in their favour by a few quid - so why have the hassle of filling in a return just for the pleasure of paying a bit more to the IR?

Yes :-)

What's a few million extra returns when they're already geared up to processing ten of millions? And they can be processed so much faster if they only contain small amounts of relevant information. They do in fact seem to be moving in the right direction, as they have brought out a new "short" version, the SA200, which is only 4 pages.

Because it cultivates our sense of responsibility.

I doubt it! With a population os (say) 60 million, how many of those are taxpayers, and how many of those which are taxpayers get asked to complete tax returns?

I doubt whether Joe Public sees it quite like that!

You'd put the smileys elsewhere?

It's not that much hassle, but when one's a bog-stock PAYE taxpayer, with no other taxable income[0] or taxable gains then it's a waste of time.

Yes, but that kinda defeats the point of PAYE...

rgds, Alan [0] maybe they thought I was taking the pi55 when I declared the 12p BRT-deduced interest /before/ reading the TR notes...