I returned after breakfast to the question of my tax return. Besides the wretched P60, I was missing the tax certificates for several dividends, which made me think there had to be a cache of tax related documents somewhere, since while I could just about believe that I'd managed to lose my P60 (though I didn't think it was likely), I couldn't believe I'd accidentally thrown out half a dozen tax vouchers as well. Eventually I found them all together in the bottom of my filing tray, where I'd evidently put them after running out of energy to finish my filing, tucked in among innumerable letters and brochures from the double glazing company. My earned income according to the P60 was of course exactly the same as the cumulative income given on my final payslip for the financial year, so the P60 did not serve any useful purpose at all.
It occurred to me as I scrabbled around trying to fill the gaps in my spreadsheets of dividends and interest that none of it actually served any useful purpose. For a basic rate tax payer, the only number that matters is the difference between your income not taxed at source, if any, and the personal tax allowance for the year in question. Tax allowance twenty pounds, untaxed income nineteen six, the tax man owes you money. Tax allowance twenty pounds, untaxed income twenty pounds ought and six, you owe the tax man money. As long as your taxed-at-source bank interest doesn't take you into the higher rate band, I don't see that it makes any difference to the final result whether it is fifty pounds, or five hundred.
That's just as well, since I discovered that I'd accidentally used the 2013 figures from one unit trust in my 2012 return. That's a disadvantage of leaving the return until the final possible month: you already have a lot of the following year's numbers swashing around. I don't suppose the Inland Revenue will notice. When I gave up working in the City, it took several letters and phone calls to convince them that I did not owe them any money on account, because the quite large salary I used to enjoy and they used to tax had ceased to be, but I can't think they bother with detailed year to year comparisons for semi-retired part time shop assistants.
Finally I was left with one missing unit trust statement. I am baffled as to where it can have got to, assuming that the Royal Mail delivered it to my house rather than stuffing it at random through somebody else's front door. I thought I remembered seeing it, so I probably did something with it, but goodness knows what. I rang the customer service number, but after jumping through all the security hoops, and the initial pain of several minutes spent on Hold listening to Einaudi, the Associate I spoke to claimed not to understand exactly what numbers I needed to know, and insisted on posting me a statement rather than risk reading the wrong ones over the phone. I'd have thought this was peak season for tax payers making anxious phone calls to verify their dividend income, and that asking what dividend you received and what tax credit was associated with it was a fairly basic question. It serves me right, though, for losing the original letter, but it's just as well I started to tackle the awful task two weeks before the end of the tax year rather than two days. Although in that case I'd have simply invented a number (see paragraph two).
Maybe this year I'll do it in May, and get it out of the way. There's a thought.
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