CHECK YOUR TAX CODE
You may be charged too much tax from April unless you act now.
HM Revenue & Customs is sending out 25 million tax codes but a large
number of them are wrong. They tell employers and pension providers how much tax
to deduct from our pay or pension. A copy headed ‘PAYE Coding Notice’ is sent to
taxpayers and they are now dropping through our letter boxes.
Every year we are all allowed a certain amount of income before tax is
paid. And our ‘tax code’ tells the employer or pension provider how much that is
so the rest can be taxed correctly. This year the Revenue has moved all our
records onto a new computer system. And it has got things wrong.
First, old jobs and other sources of income have not been properly closed
down. So if you have changed jobs, had temporary employment, or retired in the
last few years you may get a tax code for these old sources of income as well as
your current ones.
Second, the new system divides your tax free allowance up among all your
sources of income. So some of it may be allocated to an employer you no longer
work for. That leaves less for the sources of income you actually have. If that
happens you will end up paying too much tax on your income.
Call the Revenue on 0845 302 1443 to get your tax code checked. You may
have to be patient as hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of Coding
Notices are wrong.
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