Phil-S

Be aware that frozen tax thresholds are likely to bring more individuals on modest incomes into paying tax for the first time. You say you are a pensioner and only have an occupational pension. Do you not have the State Pension? The State Pension is normally paid gross and is the first item to come out of the Personal Tax Allowance that stands at £12570 per annum and has been frozen by the Chancellor until 2028. The State Pension, if paid, is subtracted from the PTA. This reduces your tax free amount, also reduces your tax code and subsequently increases your PAYE on your occupational pension. If you don't have the State pension, then your tax code is unaffected. The tax code is your tax free amount divided by 10. So if you have the State pension, say £9000 per annum, that is subtracted from the PTA (£12570) to leave £3570. This gives you a tax code of 357. You should be getting a P60 notice from your occupational pension provider either late March or early April of each tax year. You need to check what the tax code is, If it's 1257 then you don't get the State pension which is unusual if you are a pensioner of State pension age. If you don't get the State pension because you don't age qualify then you will need to take care in the future as savings interest can pull you into tax. Inflationary increases in State and other pensions may seem good, but if the thresholds don't follow inflation, then you may have to pay tax without realising it.

I’ve been helping a friend to set up a personal tax account to see the reason for why HMRC thinks they need to pay a small amount of tax through PAYE. The letter informing them of this plus the new tax code does not give enough information and hopefully by accessing the account it might be possible to work out the reason. They were able to get a Gov Gateway ID, but anything more required the use of the verification process. They entered the driving licence information and then went onto the random questions. On the first time of trying, they got the question "when did you last take out or renew a personal mobile phone contract?" This might be not the exact wording, but I had the same question some years ago and had a lot of trouble with it. They entered what they thought was the correct answer but it failed verification. On another attempt, the contract question wasn't there and they passed verification. As I recall, when I had trouble with Gov Verify, there wasn't an opportunity to try with different questions. Eventually, one of the digital managers went through the questions with me and confirmed that the process was failing at the phone contract question. I had taken out what I thought was a new phone contract in 2018 with BT. Eventually out of frustration, I entered that I had never taken out a mobile phone contract which turned out to be the correct answer. So either the information held by the credit rating agency was wrong or paying BT monthly direct debit payments for a SIM only arrangement was not a contract. Unlike many other random question security systems, HMRC does not allow the user to choose questions that they know the answer to. Instead, the HMRC system asks questions that someone thinks the user might reasonably know the answer to. Some of those questions can be many years old. What I would like to know is what in HMRCs terms is the definition of a mobile phone contract and if this type of question is going to arise, wouldn't it be more helpful if there was an attached piece of information of what is required? i.e. in this case, what defines a mobile phone contract? If my user had failed again, what would their options have been? A final question In the verification process there are two parts, the driving licence or P60? Part and the random questions. If the user failed at the initial DL or P60 stage, would there be an indication that that stage had failed or would they be allowed to proceed to the random question stage and not know where it might have failed?

Hello I am referring to this information. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowances-income-tax/income-tax-rates-and-allowances-current-and-past Why in Tax rates and bands are there blanks in the 2024-25 column for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and figures in the Scotland table? Is this an omission or a warning of things to come? Thank you