No income tax for two years

[AtW]

Whole payment on account concept is a load of crap - if they want to charge interest then they should be paying _same_ amount of interest on overpayments

[Ploptimus]

At January this year I took a FTC for a year to then review what I do after that. Due to the PoA from last year and the PAYE tax for Jan-Apr I had a tax bill of £20 which was nice. That SA/PoA however covered a payment of over £1k of student loan. I have under £1k of student loan to pay back so went through the process to wind that down. The SLC have no way of getting the info/money from HMRC until Jan next year, as such I have to keep on paying it and probably chase them to stop it out of PAYE, then ask for a SL rebate next year. I don't even want to pay off in full in case that falls foul of the fact that they don't give refunds on voluntary payments (even though its there mess that I am overpaying). The only option SLC could give me was contact HMRC and they may be able to reduce my SA liability, all well and good if it wasn't only £20 and I had already paid it! So glad that gov functions interact so well together. Maybe I will be able to do something with more than 6 people by the time I get my reabate!

[Paralytic]

I vaguely recall a rule a few years back that if your tax due was over £1,000 then you would have to pay on account? I had a large overpayment one year of about £7k.

There is a level under which you can say you want the future tax liability to be claimed back via your tax code (ie employment). Above this will, by default, mean payments on account are due. But, I'm sure you can still remove the immediate need to pay that by saying your future earnings are expected to be less in the subsequent year.

Its not immediately obvious where you can say that you want to reduce payments on account when competing your SATR

Understand your Self Assessment tax bill: Payments on account - GOV.UK

[NotAllThere]

WZS

Sorry for your troubles.

I thank 'ee for your concern, but halving my income isn't really a problem. I'm still very well paid, and have plenty of assets, so I never bothered to reduce my payments on account. My leaving do will be interesting (when it eventually happens). My colleagues for the last 15 years have been joshing me about my income - now I'll be learning a little less than them (although I'll get awesome bonuses when I bring income to the company). If you've been in pharma for ten years or more you get stupidly high salaries. And hit management and it's insane.

It's not a rebate. They're just returning what is already rightfully yours and should never have been paid in the first place. I hope they gave you interest.

Indeed they do. And quite tasty it is as well.

Pray4NAT -- too soon?

Never.