hambalapa Clark

Over the past year 2023/2024 a charity shop has sent me several emails notifying me of goods sold and amounts raised, aggregating to £249.68. The most recent one says to contact the charity within 21 days if "you expect to pay less than £62.42 in the tax year to 5th April 2024 in UK Income and/or Capital Gains Tax to meet the Gift Aid amount claimed in this tax year by Charity XXX". The wording was ambiguous so I queried it and the reply I got was that on self assessment the £62.42 was the figure that should be entered. This has confused me. The sales of goods aggregate to £249.68 so the £62.42 is exactly 25% of that. Surely the figure to entered to enter in SA100 Box 5 & 6 would be £249.68? Or is money raised by the sale of donated goods different in some way from standing order or direct debit donations.

Thank you very much indeed. I am certainly not a tax expert and it is kind of you to say "missed" when it would more accurate to say "misunderstood" :-) Thank you for confirming the problem with the Gift Aid bit. I was looking for a free tax calculator and I think I found stccalculator initially by following web link path on the AgeUK web site. I think that this is actually quite a serious matter, as HMRC is professional and therefore everyone should be able to trust an HMRC calculator. I imagine elderly people like myself who are pushed further into the higher rate band by the "frozen" personal allowance" might be concerned if they knew that gift aid was not being factored in automatically for non-self-assessment tax payers, and I also imagine such people might easily take the stccalculator tax calculator at face value. Who do I lobby to get it fixed? PS I wonder what the aggregate figure of unclaimed Gift Aid tax rebates by higher rate payers might be? I wonder if anyone has issued an FOI?

This is very helpful. With my Personal Tax Account the 2022-2023 tax account it insists that I have paid the right amount of tax, but it has not taken account of gift aid and there is no provision to enter the gift aid or even to see the calculation. I used the HMRC tax checker at http://stccalculator.hmrc.gov.uk/UserDetails.aspx which has a link "Show summary of calculation" but if you are a higher rate payer the calculation is incorrect - a) It incorporates the figure of less than £400 - say £144" for "UK interest that has not been taxed" into the Total Income aggregate, and b) the gift aid figure is not incorporated into extending the basic rate band. So the assertion at the end of the summary "This checker will only provide the right result if you enter all your details correctly." is incorrect - I provide the correct details but the calculation is wrong. I have verified this by using the HMRC approved GoSimpleTax through the on-line Which magazine. I have written to HMRC setting out the figures and requesting a P800 and was my custom when I did self-assessment posted it signed for delivery to the BX91AS contact address given in the Personal Tax Account web page. A month later it still hasn't been delivered - because, as I now know, BX91AS is not a physical address. This really should be made clear on the web page. After googling I found that courier post should go to NE98 1ZZ, and resent the letter, and it has been delivered. But this information should have been on the Personal Account web page. For at least 30 years I have always found HMRC staff very helpful, but the Personal Account system needs fundamental improvements, and I hope my drawing attention to these issues, particularly the stccalculator will be taken constructively.

If you are a higher rate tax payer your aggregate Gift Aid is grossed up by multiplying by 1.25 and the self assessment calculator will extend the 20% tax band. You may find that you are due a tax rebate if the actual gift aid aggregate is higher than the expected gift aid aggregate when you were given your code. This can happen when you donate goods to charity shops who then sell the goods and let you know the amounts in the immediate months after the end of the tax year. In other words you cannot predict at the start of the tax year what your aggregate gift aid will be. Does the HMRC Connect system "harvest" your gift aid donations automatically? If you have a personal tax account instead of doing self-assessment how can you be confident that HMRC has this data when it calculates if you have paid the right amount of tax?