Tax charge

[Midgeymoo12]

Any tax experts on here that can offer advice? I have received a tax bill of close to £2000. When I have looked into this the charge relates back to 2017 when I changed employers (within the NHS but different hospitals). Even if I did underpay it seems unfair to receive a bill 3-4 years on when this is not a mistake on my part. I have always been on PAYE and if I have underpaid it must have been on moving between the jobs / incorrect tax code.

Any advise on now I can proceed?

Not a tax expert but I would start by looking at your last few year's P60s and seeing if the amount of tax paid was correct. You can calculate the correct amounts for different years using a website like listentotaxman.

Have you had a company car in any of that time, or other benefits that would mean you don't get the full personal allowance? Sometimes these can take a couple of years to properly catch up with what you should be paying.

Are you one of those doctors who earns over £100k so falls foul of some quirk in the tax system?

Does everything look right on your P60 and payslips if you have them with pension contributions etc?

Thanks for the advice. I spoke to payroll and it seems te problem is switching employers mid year and both have given me my 11K tax free allowance! HMRC advised the second employer to do this even! I am going to appeal it as this is their mistake and it is such a long time ago.

@Midgeymoo12, see MSE about trying to use A19 for the underpaid tax. It's worth a shot.

Oh that's a huge pain for you - did you get a P45 when you moved over from one job to the next?

Was it not obvious to you that you were receiving too much at the time?

Ah, that would do it . NHS Payroll, gotta love em.

They did ours for a while and there were endless mistakes every month that they would blithely say 'oh email us and we'll fuck it up in a different way fix it in the next payroll run' but when they were making mistakes like massively underpaying or not paying anything to people who had worked for us for years, it got to the stage of our department head bellowing down the phone that he was going to send a person home unless their salary had been paid by lunchtime.

Definitely appeal and if it gets to the stage that you have to pay, which it might because in reality you should and you really should have noticed the mistake, ask for it to be added to your tax code for 2021/2 so it is taken off gradually over the whole year.

If you can't afford that, see if it can be taken over a longer period- I don't know if this is possible.