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@ConfusedTaxpayer27 Thanks for the compliment, but I have no affiliation with HMRC whatsoever - I'm just an individual taxpayer who has spent entirely too much time dealing with my own affairs and my immediate family's :-)
OK, so if it's financially important to obtain relief in 2023/24, I think you're looking at making a Negligible Value Claim.
Before talking about that, though, let's talk about the "Relief now for 2024-25 trade losses or certain capital losses" box. The question is... is share loss relief a "certain capital loss"? I have been unable to find a good answer to this. What I did find is that someone claimed it was, was told they were wrong by HMRC, fought it in through the Upper Tribunal and the Court of Appeal being told no, but then the Supreme Court reversed the judgements of lower courts and said it was!
https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2017-0127
Crikey. So that seems like a minefield.
But here's the thing... you might not need to care about this because if you are going forward with a Negligible Value Claim, the NVC can create a "deemed" disposal for tax purposes at an earlier point in time ... provided the asset actually was of negligible value at that time. So, if you think you can show the shares were already of negligible value before 5th April 2024, you might be able to treat everything as happening in the 2023/24 tax year, significantly simplifying the form filling.
As for actually making a NVC, though, I have been unable to locate clear instructions on how much evidence is necessary to prove negligible value - and what I have found online seems contradictory. For that, I fear you may need actual professional advice, unless you want to take a "try it and see" approach, and hope HMRC chooses to exercise the discretion described in https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/capital-gains-manual/cg13145 .
I'm sorry I couldn't be more help - for my own affairs, I'm currently aiming to hold claims until companies are dissolved and claim only against my current year Income to avoid having to deal with much of this labyrinth.
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You can't claim loss relief on the portion of the purchase price for which you received income tax relief (30% under current rules).
But, you can claim loss relief on the remaining loss after taking off the amount already relieved, if the loss was greater - i.e. if the amount lost was more than 30% of the purchase price.
Source: "If you claimed EIS Income Tax relief when you subscribed for the shares, the amount of Income Tax relief must be deducted from your loss." in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-hs286-self-assessment-he/hs286-negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-2024
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@kaianders In my experience, if you're looking at these figures on the pages at the end of filling in your tax return, they show only the tax due based on that return in isolation, without adjusting for your position on account... which is unhelpful.
Instead, try navigating within your online tax account to the "View account" > "Tax years" section (in the right-hand navigation) - there, you should be able to view the amount of on account credit you already have paid for 2023/24, and manually set that against the Jan 31st liability from the return to decide how much you actually need to pay.
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Admin 20's response refers to the tax treatment of sums paid as compensation for the loss of employment, however it does *not* apply to payment in lieu of notice (PILON). It is quite common to receive one final payment from an employer and then need to carefully divide it up into amounts of redundancy compensation, PILON, holiday payout, etc. to correctly determine the tax position. An introduction to some of this can be found at https://www.gov.uk/termination-payments-and-tax-when-you-leave-a-job/what-you-pay-tax-and-national-insurance-on
If the payment is truly all PILON, then it would *all* be taxable as regular earnings... except that it then was salary sacrificed, removing it from taxable earnings. 60k is the exact amount of the usual pensions Annual Allowance, and the suggested total earnings of 60k+10k are well below the point where high earner's Annual Allowance tapering would start.
Assuming you've never taken pension benefits in a way which would trigger the Money Purchase Annual Allowance, the entire 60k would be tax free, PROVIDED it is the only contribution going into your pension in this tax year. If more than 60k has gone into the pension in the tax year, you exceed the Annual Allowance for the year and may have liability to a Pensions Savings Tax Charge... except you may have unused Annual Allowance from the previous 3 years which in many but not all cases you can carry forward to cover the excess contributions without a charge. Unfortunately it's all rather complicated and each answer sometimes ends up posing several more questions :-)
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Is there a reason you're not claiming the EIS Income tax relief? Unless you're not eligible for some reason, I know of no downside. Whilst it's too late for you to claim EIS subscriptions from before 6th April 2023 on a new Self Assessment return, the deadline is MORE GENEROUS when filling in paper EIS3 forms: "If you invest with Enterprise Investment Scheme, Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme or Social Investment Tax Relief, you can claim relief up to 5 years after the 31 January following the tax year in which you made the investment." from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/venture-capital-schemes-tax-relief-for-investors You also MUST have claimed the Income tax relief in order to be eligible for relief from Capital Gains tax on any gain at disposal.
Turning now to the loss relief you initially asked about, it is HELPFUL to have claimed EIS Income tax relief because the conditions to claim loss relief - as documented at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-hs286-self-assessment-he/hs286-negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-2024#in-what-type-of-company-should-i-have-subscribed-for-shares - are that EITHER you claimed the income tax relief (and it has not been withdrawn) OR a long list of other conditions that are harder to be certain of. So it's NOT necessary to have claimed the Income tax relief to be eligible for loss relief, but it does help make things simpler.
In your position, I'd first look to claim any Income tax relief that you are eligible for and for which the claim isn't out of time. If the companies are in administration but not yet dissolved, it is not urgent that you deal with the loss relief in your current return - you haven't crystallised the loss yet. The loss only occurs when you choose to make a negligible value claim, or actually cease to own the shares, e.g. on dissolution, so it sounds like you could choose to deal with it in next year's Self Assessment.
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If you need the loss relief whilst the company is *in liquidation*, then you'd need to do a negligible value claim, and deal with the evidentiary requirements for that. (Or perhaps, the wording at https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/capital-gains-manual/cg13145 might imply that in some cases HMRC might be prepared to accept less evidence in some cases, but I have been unable to find a clear statement on that point.)
But, if you can afford to wait for the loss relief until the liquidation finishes and the company is dissolved, that complexity goes away, and you are just reporting a concrete loss that has occurred - referring again to HS286 at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-hs286-self-assessment-he/hs286-negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-2024 :
"(share loss relief) — the disposal may be as a result of making a negligible value claim, but the relief is available for other types of disposal"
providing a clear statement that share loss relief doesn't necessarily require a negligible value claim, if another allowed type of disposal (such as dissolution of the company) crystallises the loss instead.
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The tax return guide a.k.a. SA150 Notes also explicitly describes the 51/1 method in the notes for the relevant box. It too mentions the variation for pensions started before 6 April 2010.
It also specifically says NOT to calculate based on 4-weekly payments received, so HMRC Admin 21 is contradicting the official published notes.
@Clive Smaldon: I agree that the amounts are small and the method feels unnecessarily overcomplicated, but since HMRC explicitly lays out the method it wants to be followed, we can only reasonably comply.
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@ConfusedTaxpayer27 No, you don't have to still hold the shares at the time of filing the return to benefit from share loss relief.
Source: HS286 "The loss must have been made on a disposal by way of one of the following: ... the dissolution of the company ...".
Therefore shares held until the company is dissolved do count as a qualifying disposal.
Furthermore, it makes things simpler if the company has actually been dissolved, as then you can simply claim for the actual loss - whereas if liquidation is ongoing, you have to make a Negligible Value Claim with appropriate evidence - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/negligible-value-agreements#negligible-value-claims-for-company-shares-and-securities which may not be trivial to collect.
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AFAIK, pay in lieu of notice is treated equivalently to normal pay. Once you salary sacrifice it, it should be equivalent to any other pay you salary sacrifice.
Does it count as earnings? That depends on the context. It wouldn't count as directly taxable (that being the point of the salary sacrifice), but it would count in the calculations for a high earner's tapered pension Annual Allowance.
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I am guessing that when you say that Self Assessment takes the default tax code of 1257L, you mean it says your Personal Allowance is £12570 - and that is probably correct. As far as I know, there is only one reason a Personal Allowance can be more than that, according to https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates.
Having a tax code of 1632L does *not* mean you have a Personal Allowance of £16320 - it means that HMRC estimate that when all of the allowances and deductions that are being managed through your tax code are added up, that's what they will come to.
Your next step should be to look at the Notice of Coding that told you your tax code (which can also be found in your online tax account), and see what elements other than the Personal Allowance were included in it. You can then check to see if all those elements are also included in your tax return. An allowance included in your code, but not claimed in the return, would explain what you describe.
It can be helpful to think of it like this: your tax code is an estimate to get your tax affairs approximately right over the course of the year. Then, at the end of the year, Self Assessment looks back over everything, ignoring the estimate, and recalculating a final value from scratch. (It does get more complicated if your tax code is also being used to collect underpaid tax from previous tax years - but apart from that special case, tax codes have no bearing on the Self Assessment calculation at all!)