2 weeks Ago By Alex Evans
Workers earning less than £13,000 have been hit with fines by HMRC worth as much as £300 each. More than 83,000 people earning too little to even owe any tax at all to HMRC - so, less than £12,570 - have been fined up to £300 for failing to file a tax return on time. The Personal Allowance is £12,570, which means that any money you earn below that amount is not subject to Income Tax, assuming you have no other income.
But HMRC may in many circumstances, such as being self-employed, ask you to file a self-assessment tax return, the deadline for which is October 31 if filing a paper return (which many have to use for certain reasons) or January 31 online. Even if you don’t owe any tax, you can still be fined for failing to file a tax return which would prove this. According to figures from the Observer via Tax Policy Associates, more than 83,000 people who earned less than the £12,570 tax threshold were hit with a £100 penalty in 2021-22 with just 17,000 fines cancelled on appeal.
HMRC also sent out 61,000 £300 fines for filing a year late, and of those, half of those were to people earning less than £12,570. By contrast, only 5,000 people earning more than £100,000 a year were fined for the same offence. An HMRC spokesperson said: “The government recognises that taxpayers who occasionally miss the filing deadline should not face financial penalties and reform of the system is under way.
Our aim is to support all taxpayers, regardless of income, to get their tax right and avoid fines. “The overwhelming majority of customers file on time.”.
