His/Hers Majestys Revenue & Customs (HMRC)
HMRC would be the Australian Tax Office (ATO) equivalent or the USA’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which deals with all things tax. I submitted a tax return about 3 months ago, just before I left to go back to Australia for 2 months. Since I don’t have any knowledge of the UK tax system, I handballed this particular task off to my accountant.
The accountant assured me that the Tax Return would be processed in about 2 weeks and the good news was that I was going to receive a tax refund of around £200. While in Australia I had heard no news of the tax return or saw any credit transferred to my bank account. It was not until I returned back to London did I call up HMRC to see what was going on. It turns out that after 3 months, this straight forward tax return application still hadn’t being processed!
How difficult could it be? The tax return application was like 2 pages and all they had to do was punch these numbers in to the computer, and the computer would spit out a figure (negative for tax refund, positive for tax owing – simple). It wasn’t like they had to compute each tax return manually, we live in the age of computers!
Well I did receive the tax return calculation letter back this week and to my surprise the accountant informed me that instead of receiving a tax refund of £200, I owed HRMC £500! How did this happen? Did my accountant stuff something up?
My accountant said that there was an “additional student loan repayment (hightlighted) that is due but as we were not informed of this, it was not included on the personal tax calculation”. Hold on a sec. What is a student loan repayment I asked? In the 2 years I have been in London, there was never a time I became a student so why would I have a student loan? Also on the Working-Holiday Visa, I’m quite sure you cannot just take up a course randomly like that, you’d need a student visa?
After a few calls to HMRC, I got a few things cleared up and was finally told that they would re-calculate my tax return application. They said if I was sure I didn’t tick the student loan repayment option because that was the only way it would have been calculated. I said, how would I know how much to pay in student loans in the first place?
So in conclusion, some dumbass in HMRC still trying to get over the Christmas hangover tries to slug me with a £700 tax on a Student Loan Repayment that doesn’t exist. Her Majesty please get it right this time and sack the idiot for wasting my time.
smiles