Wrong tax code for PAYE

I'm not up to date on HMRC procedures under Real Time Information (where employers deal with PAYE online). But if your previous employer was bad at admin it may be they still don't know you only have one source of income. HMRC may be able to sort it out if the employer did better at the end of the year but goodness knows when.

There is an online service you can use to tell HMRC your code is wrong

*if* you have been sent a PAYE coding notice for 2015-16. See But from what you say I take it you have had nothing from HMRC.

If so, I think you might do better to start by asking HMRC to deal with your overpayment of tax in 2014-15. There is an online service for this too. See

(I'm sorry to say I'm not sure you'll be able to use that without a P45. So you may end up having to write. Whatever you do, I think you'll need your final payslip from your previous job. Take a photocopy before sending it to HMRC!)

Hi Robin, thanks for the reply. In my April call to HMRC, the actual human told me they'd be sending me a cheque for that (didn't need any paperwork), but nothing has arrived. HMRCs phone system is full of messages saying they are still processing refunds though...

That's illegal, not just bad admin. contains a lot of information on the legal position and processes.

At least they didn't put you on a BR tax code. They seem to have split the allowance equally between the two employers. The T means that there is something funny that needs review (or you requested not to have a more specific letter).

The new employer should have put you on a week 1/month 1 basis, so you should only have overpaid in proportion to the part of the year you actually worked for them.

If they haven't received the P45, they are going to have to wait for the P35 to discover the final situation. They are not going receive that until significantly after April 5th.

The time to ring HMRC was when you failed to get the P45 on the day you left the old job.

If you had a new tax code, you should have received a copy of the notification of the code, not just a change in the payslip.

The incompetence (probably criminal negligence) lies with the old employer. HMRC doesn't work on the time scales that would like. In fact, in normal circumstances one has to wait the a whole tax year for tax codes to sort themselves out. Although I wouldn't expect that to happen in the case of an employer acting illegally, they may well want to wait for the P35 to confirm what you are saying, as they probably normally trust employers more than employees.

On the other hand, even if they don't believe you, it seems to me that they could issue a BR code to the old employer and allocate the whole allowance to the new one.

I suspect most people here are working on the basis that they won't get this year's code fixed, but rather they will get that for the following year adjusted.

I would suggest that you request a voluntary tax return for last year. Whilst they should be able to calculate last year's overpayment and either refund it, or correct it in your 2016/17 tax code, once they have both P35s, it may help to have your side of the story. In particular, if the old employer fails to mark you as terminated on their P35, they may get the tax code to compensate for the overpayment, rather than your getting a direct payment.

Write clearly in the additional information that the employment has terminated but you received neither a P45 nor a P60. They have until tomorrow to give you a P60 if they think you are still an employee, so don't rush in to submitting a return before then!

I don't think they will be able to send the cheque until they have processed the annual returns from both employers, as only then do they know how much tax has already been collected.

They told me over the phone that all the returns were in - as I'd expect from the new live updating system instead of just waiting for end of year figures...

phone HMRC on 0300 200 3310

Seems from that your old employer did at least tell HMRC your pay and tax details which is good news.

Under the new RTI system employers do not submit end of year returns (Forms P35 and P14). Their final payment submissions by 19 April cover it all (with a few additional twiddles - eg for employees who aren't paid in the final pay period). So HMRC should indeed have had long ago all they need from both jobs to compute your repayment.

That ought to be good enough evidence to revise the PAYE code too. But the difference *may* be that the repaymenrt is the result of automatic reconciliation of CY-1 while the code is a work item which requires application of human eyeball. But I'm guessing as don't know just what goes where, when under RTI.

I have an error on my tax coding..... So braced with your experienced I pre pared myself for a long wait and went round doing all my usual jobs in a mo rning but having my coding notice and phone ringing next to me! It seems that you only get a coding notice if you have a significant change to your circumstances....which for me was a receipt of state pension. It seems the only way to contact HMRC is phone...0300 which on BT is free f or the first 59mins, and the number is on the coding notice. There's about

10 mins of giving your identity information and finally after 43 mins I got through to a nice lady who recognised the problem and fixed it straight aw ay (she says!). It was related to health benefit which ceased for me in 201

1. Apparently they had it on every calculation since then but because I nev er received a coding notice I never realised. It didn't matter for me becau se when I filled in my tax return I didn't declare medical insurance so it wasn't used in the final tax bill.