If you can post on Prune *** you can handle your own tax unless your income or job is very specialist, in which case an accountant may be preferable. The best DIY way is to pay £30 or so per year for an excellent commercial tax calc programme. This will allow you to check your tax to the penny and see for yourself if your coding is correct. You can then decide whether to register with the Govt Gateway and HMRC. It takes a while but when done you can log-in and web-message them to correct your code if it's a big error, or you can wait until year's end and pick up any refund with an on-line tax return from within the programme.
HMRC may tell you that you do not have to submit a tax return. That does not mean you should assume you will be taxed correctly. Significant errors occur even with simple PAYE and pension income. You can only be sure if you have checked it for yourself. If it is wrong, it is then time to submit a tax return. You can also use such commercial programmes to submit returns for friends and family and I have secured several thousand ££ of refunds this way. Funny that it's always
over-collection of tax. I've never met an
under-payment situation but I did succeed with an ESC A19 application for
under-collected PAYE, where HMRC held the information but failed to use it, while assuring the unsuspecting customer that everything was being taken care of.
Personally I avoid phoning HMRC and personally I prefer not use HMRC's online tax return software. Assembling all your info is often time consuming and I find it easier to do it at my leisure and only when I am sure it's all sorted do I go on-line and submit.
A Tax Coding is nothing more than someone's best
guess for the current year.
Hope this helps.
.......... LFH
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