IN March George Osborne announced “We will abolish the annual tax return”.
I hope that none of your readers will be fooled into thinking that they don’t need to do a tax return. Paper tax returns must be submitted by September 30 and e-filed returns must be submitted by January 31 or an automatic £100 penalty will be charged.
The grain of truth behind the bold pre-election promise of ‘abolishing tax returns’ is that they must all be done online by 2020 and HMRC will pre-populate your return with the information they already hold – wages information from your employer, pension details and interest received from banks.
However, all this relies on the government delivering a major IT system upgrade for HMRC.
Given past performance on delivering major IT projects, 2020 may simply mean after the next election.
In the meantime the annual tax return still needs to be completed by anyone who has income on which tax has not been paid.
Sam Corcoran Cheshire
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