News
Delayed Tax Repayments
In the latest issue (Issue 35)of HMRC’s working together bulletin, the Revenue have commented on the recent delays to taxpayers repayments
The Revenue have acknowledged that taxpayers are experiencing substantial delays in receiving their repayments.
The working together bulletin says:
· ‘ delays have been caused by a combination of a very much sharper peak of repayments in January and February, arising from the move to greater online filing, and more repayments being selected for our security checking processes.’
In our opinion a large number of security checks are being carried out throughout the year, and they are carried out more frequently than previous tax years.
· ‘HMRC uses an automated risk based process to identify which repayments can be immediately released and selects those which require further (manual) checks. The majority of repayments are immediately released. Similarly, the majority of repayments selected for manual checks pass those checks and are released for payment. But it is at this manual check stage that the delays are occurring.’
· ‘Over the last few months we have dealt with 90 per cent of those repayments selected for manual checking within 30 days’.
In our experience those repayments selected for security checks are taking an average of 6 – 8 weeks before the repayment is released.
· ‘We also know that customers have sometimes been misled by SA outputs, including online filing messages that indicate that a SA repayment has been issued. These outputs and messages are necessarily generated further up the process from the point where the checking processes operate (ie before any cases have been selected for manual checks). The SA statement does include an explanation that repayments may be selected for further checking in the notes on the reverse of the form, but this is often overlooked. Any significant delay between a message indicating that a repayment has been issued and the actual issue of the repayment may create additional work for tax agents (and may, indeed, undermine a customer’s trust in an agent).’.
These messages are generated before the manual checks are carried out and lead taxpayers to believe the repayment has already been issued. Rest assured we do everything in our power to obtain tax repayments as quickly as possible.
18th Aug 2009