Can I do this or am I breaking the law

[Brown246]

Just after some advice if possible. I am self employed and as a family we get universal credit. When declaring my earnings each month I obviously put in all of my business expenses which then significantly lowers my earnings - to be clear I don't try and fudge it at all, these are legitimate expenses.

The problem I have is that we want to move house in the next year or so and therefore need my earnings to look as high as possible from a mortgage point of view.

Is it legal to declare my expenses on my Universal Credit earnings but then not declare as many of them on my tax return in order for my earnings to look as good as they possibly can from a mortgage point of view? Or will UC then be in touch and say their figures don't match with HMRC?

I definitely don't want to do anything illegal/immoral and just wondered where I stood with doing this? Thanks in advance.

They have a whole team devoted to this kind of stuff at UC - believe me when I say it’s not worth it - my H is self employed, I have a limited company , it’s one reason I abandoned the pay yourself a small salary and dividend on rest ( less tax)it was proving very very hard to quantify earnings , so in the end sucked it up and paid PAYE up to 50k , dividends over that ( at higher rate dividend) - we actually rent , but nice places and it was simply hard to prove the income multiples by showing a lower but tax efficient income - don’t risk it OP , if you need to show higher income, suck it up and claim less expenses and accept your UC will reduce , what you do after that is up to you - but you will need to give it a year

You strongly risk getting done for benefits fraud and getting refused a mortgage for lying.

HMRC and DWP are very closely linked. There is no way their systems don't talk to eachother.

So no, don't do benefit fraud and mortgage fraud. It's not worth the risk

HMRC can only access people's bank account records in certain circumstances, such as when conducting an investigation into their affairs. They don't have routine access to everybody's account records.

Allowable expenses for UC are different for some things than for tax as UC is less generous in what they allow you to claim so the figures on the two returns may genuinely be different.
Generally there are things like use of home calculations or mileage that are allowances rather than actual cash expenses so if you were thinking of not claiming that sort of thing your tax return would probably only bump up to the reported figures on UC anyway.