To gift aid under my partners name

[RestingBitch]

I've been going to a few charity type museums with my son recently which give you the option to add gift aid to your entrance fee. I'm now only working part time so don't pay tax anymore. Would I be completely unreasonable to use my partners details to offer the gift aid if he's not there? He's got a name which can be used for either a male or female so it would be obvious that I'm not him IYSWIM.

YABU because you can still gift aid in your own name.

Basically you are committing fraud for no good reason at all.

To the best of my knowlwdge to give gift aid you just need to be a UK taxpayer and by the sounds of it you are a UK taxpayer. It is not a personal link to your personal tax account and contributions. I.e. if you are paying higher rate tax, charities don't get 40% or 50% to reflect this they still get 20%. These things may or not balance themselves out but it's probably the most sensible way to administer the scheme. There isn't a little elf sitting at HMRC HQ cross checking all charity contributions against people. That would be very expensive and time consuming for HMRC to do. Cross checking I imagine would only happen for high risk/tax fraud cases where forensic accountants are used.

From Hmrc gift aid rules pasted below. Could he pay for the children's entry online? Leaving you to pay for yours?

The rules also discuss family membership in a different section. It appears he could gift aid a national trust family membership for example. You and the children could then attend.

Family membership
3.37.8 Many organisations offer family membership arrangements that give all the rights of individual membership, but at a reduced cost. Where a charity offers family membership the subscription is a gift to the charity provided the subscription:

secures membership for the donor
satisfies the conditions in ‘Membership subscriptions’
3.37.9 The fact that the subscription gives members of the donor’s family rights of membership too doesn’t change this as the payment is, primarily, a gift from the donor to the charity. The donor must, however, be the person who has given a Gift Aid declaration to the charity.

Paying other people’s subscriptions
3.37.10 The payment to a charity to secure individual membership rights for a person other than the donor aren’t gifts to the charity. This includes an individual membership purchased for a family member (spouse, parent etc) that’s not secured as part of a family membership scheme. This is because although the payment is made to the charity the gift is to the person whose membership subscription is being paid.

However, this doesn’t extend to payments made in respect of a donor’s minor children (children under 18 years of age). So, a payment that satisfies the conditions to be treated as a gift if made in respect of the donor personally will be accepted as a gift if it’s made for their minor child.

Actually newdaddie is mistaken, gift aid is linked to the amount of tax you pay - www.gov.uk/donating-to-charity/gift-aid

"Your donations will qualify as long as they’re not more than 4 times what you have paid in tax in that tax year (6 April to 5 April).

The tax could have been paid on income or capital gains.

You must tell the charities you support if you stop paying enough tax."

OP is right not to gift aid in her name as she isn't paying tax.

Hand yourself in to the police now

The charity gets the same whether you are a basic, higher or additional rate taxpayer, but if you pay tax at 40% or 45% then gift aid payments increase your basic rate band and so you will pay less tax (although you'd need to include that on your tax return).

For the charity to get tax relief then the person making the payment needs to have paid tax to the amount the charity gets. But I don't know whether and how it gets checked and for small amounts probably doesn't.

Don't sign a gift aid declaration for a gift if you don't pay enough tax yourself to cover it. If the charity get a gift aid audit they will check every penny and you personally (not the charity) will be billed by HMRC for the tax the charity claimed. This happened to one of our donors when I worked for a charity.

Seconding peuk, I feel awful when I say I can't especially when at many places now their entry fees are linked to it. I don't think everyone is aware of the rules

I do it if I'm donating online, or on sponsorship forms. I don't work due to illness and have always used my DH's name for gift aid. Why should charities miss out just because I can't work?

It's perfectly OK to do that. DH is an unwitting supporter of Cats Protection.

TipBoov thanks for the correction I was completely wrong.

Sorry OP

MirandaWest - the claims for gift aid go in in batches (e.g. annually) and a random sample of those get audited. So the size of the amount doesn't make it less likely to get checked. This said, if the charity can prove that they received the gift aid declaration and had no way of knowing that it wasn't the correct name, I don't think anything more would ever come of it for anybody.

However, if it had OPs name and she really isn't paying tax HMRC could contact her for the outstanding gift aid amount.

Essentially, it doesn't matter much at all but I just wanted to warm that it being a small amount doesn't mean it won't get checked out.

YABU. Don't you know how strongly most of MN is against tax avoidance, which is what Gift Aid is.

By gift aiding the museums, you are stealing from the Government, which will cause them to take benefits off poor people to pay for it .

Yeah, if your earnings fall within the personal allowance, meaning you do not pay basic rate tax, you cannot claim Gift Aid for a charity. If you did and filled in a Tax Return or Claim for repayment (e.g. of tax on interest paid) you would have to pay the amount that HMRC had paid the charity in Gift Aid, assuming you declared it.

HMRC can't give the charity money you have paid in tax if you haven't paid any tax.

Charities shouldn't assume that everyone pays enough tax to cover it, so I wouldn't feel bad about that if it were me. If it bothers you, perhaps just make a bigger donation to cover what you'd have gift aided.

You can't pay gift aid under your own name .... contrary to what the "chugger" in town tried to tell me a couple of years ago. I have even had to contact the charity shop to remove my gift aid this year as I had not earned enough (irregular wages so was paying tax when I signed up). I now use DH'S card when I donate stuff there - it's from the same house. He is signed up for gift aid for our church even though he only goes about once also year 😉.

If you are earning under the taxable limit have you thought of transferring some of your allowance to your DH? Worth a look.

Just say ' sorry, I don't earn enough' . this is what I do as it is true.

Cocked it up one year, totted up the donations and had to pay fifty quid to the revenue to sort it out.