Tax return Articles

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Tired of finishing that self-assessment with just a few late January days to spare? This could be the year when you finally make a change.

It’s a feeling that many contractors will be all too familiar with. One minute you’re toasting the end of another successful year, the next you’re staring down at a mountain of work you didn’t get done before the Christmas break and, all the while, precious seconds are ticking down on the self-assessment deadline.

Sure, you don’t really want to think about it while the World Cup is on and the sun is out, but completing your tax return paperwork early does have a lot of benefits.

Here are four that we think are most important.

With little more than a week to go before the self-assessment tax deadline hits, it is worth double-checking whether or not you have to submit a tax return.

If you have to send a tax return and you miss the 31^st January deadline then you will be penalised. If your tax return is less than three months late then you’ll have to pay a fine of £100, but this figure can rise quickly if you submit a return after three months or you pay your tax late.

For certain groups like company directors, it is pretty obvious that you will have to pay. But there are some complicated rules that you might not have taken into account.

If you are an umbrella contractor with Umbrella.co.uk, then as a rule of thumb you won’t have to submit a tax return, but there are some circumstances that may contradict that. 

A controversial proposal that could see small business owners forced to update their tax bill four times a year will be debated in parliament next week, after an online petition was signed by more than 100,000 people.

The parliamentary petitions committee, which handles online petitions, has scheduled a debate on ‘quarterly tax returns’ for the afternoon of the 25^th of January.

Small business owners reacted angrily when the proposal was first announced by Chancellor George Osborne at his Autumn Statement. To vent frustration, business owner Paul Johnson started an online petition that has since been signed by over 107,000 people. 

New research from the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) has found that less than half of people who say they’d like to be self-employed are actually working for themselves.

A lack of support and guidance for tasks like budgeting and filing tax returns was highlighted as one of the major barriers stopping would-be self-employed workers.

The national charity also found that the gap between self-employment aspiration and achievement grows larger for adults under the age of 35.

Almost half (48%) of people aged 18-34 said that they would like to be self-employed but only 7% of people in this age bracket work for themselves.