Inland Revenue Fines Taxpayers Who Beat The Filing Deadline

by Robert Lee, Tax-News.com, London

28 May 2004

The UK’s tax collector has blamed “individual processing errors” for the handing out of numerous late filing penalties to taxpayers who handed their tax returns in before the filing deadline.

The Inland Revenue dishes out an automatic £100 fine for taxpayers who do not file their returns before the January 31 deadline and over 950,000 such penalties were issued by the department this year.

However, the Revenue has admitted that a number of these fines were issued by mistake.

"We know that a number of these penalty notices were issued wrongly and we want to apologise. Where they have been issued in error, we will cancel the notice immediately," a spokesman was reported as saying.

Because the blunder was “not a computer error” the Revenue says it does not know how many wrong £100 demands have been issued, adding it does not intend to track down the wrongly-issued notices.

Kevin Walmsley, a partner at Wilkins Kennedy, the accounting firm, observed: "This does happen on a regular basis. Our concern is that innocent taxpayers who don't have professional advisers will have paid this fine rather than confront the Inland Revenue."

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