450,000 more caught in tax error fiasco

I read today that a further 450,000 people have been trapped in the long-running chaos caused by HM Revenue and Customs.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/tax/income/article.html?in_article_id=521097&in_page_id=77&ct=5

Letters will be sent out over the next three months telling recipients they paid too little tax and owe an average of £400 each. The total amount owed is £180m.

The new victims come on top of the six million taxpayers caught up in a HMRC blunder revealed last September.

Anyone who receives such a demand ought to consider invoking extra statutory concession A19. The practice under A19 is to write-off tax where HMRC notify the arrears more than 12 months after the end of the tax year in which it received the relevant information and the taxpayer could therefore reasonably have believed that his or her tax affairs were up to date.

It is on this basis that the 250,000 pensioners are getting their reprieve and quite right too! But there is nothing in A19 which says that you have to be 65 to get its benefits. The BBC was ticked off yesterday for being ageist. There is no reason why HMRC should get away with being ageist as well as incompetent.