Can anyone recommend an accountant to resolve a PAYE underpayment issue?

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I have a tricky HMRC/PAYE issue, which means I have underpaid my tax. I have been passed from pillar to post from my employer to the company it outsourced its tax services to and have tried to get help from two local accountants, who haven't been able to assist. I've also used AI to try and summarise the issues.

Could anyone recommend an accountant who specialises in issues like this and can help me? I am (embarrassingly) really bad at understanding tax and need someone who could take the problem off my hands and help me to pay the tax and prevent it from happening again.

Thank you. All recommendations would be appreciated.

Can HMRC not help? Normally it's because your tax code is wrong.

thank you - I've spoken to HMRC and we can't get to the bottom of why my code is wrong and how to rectify it. I'm employed with no other income sources. I'd like someone to look at see how to correct it and stop it from happening again.

Do you have all your payslips from this year and any change in tax code notices?
Was everything correct for the tax year 24/25?

If you have no other income or other tax events during this year then I don’t understand why the accountants could not assist. What did they actually say was the issue?

HMRC have all the data. If their data/demand agrees with your wages and tax deducted, then any shortfall is rightly due. That's all that matters really. Check the HMRC demand and calculations.

It really doesn't matter "why" the tax deducted through payroll was wrong. It could have been the employer using a wrong tax code, it could have been HMRC issuing a wrong tax code, it could have been that you changed jobs during the year and the old job P45 wasn't entered properly, or at all, or too late, into the new employer's wages system. But finding out "why" it happened doesn't help you, as if you've not paid enough tax, then you've not paid enough tax and you are due to pay it.

I am happy to pay what I owe; just need to understand how to make sure it's correct in future. I have all my payslips - HMRC think my employee provided an incorrect forecast of my potential earnings which made the tax code incorrect. I think the code has been incorrect for a while but I hadn't realised (I know it's the tax payer's responsibility to check tax codes but I find this subject difficult and stressful and don't have the knowledge to know if it's right or wrong.)

Employers never make any "forecast" of future earnings. You're either misunderstanding or the HMRC person you talked to hasn't a clue.

If you think your current PAYE code is incorrect, that's very different to a tax demand/statement for a past year. You can see your PAYE code detail on your online tax account, so can easily check it yourself. Then you can check it against your payslip to check your employer is using the right PAYE code. If you think it's wrong, you can just fill in the online form to ping to HMRC to tell them your earnings etc and they'll correct it.

Employers never make any "forecast" of future earnings. You're either misunderstanding or the HMRC person you talked to hasn't a clue.

No, but hmrc do assume if you're employed that you'll continue to receive the same monthly salary, and use this to predict your annual income. This is then relevant to your tax code because (for example) a high earner will be recognised & they'll adjust your tax code to remove the personal allowance.

Op there are usually two ways this is resolved. If at some point you've underpaid a bit, HMRC will often just adjust your tax code so that you pay slightly more tax each month the following year/rest of the tax year to pay it back. If it's a bigger amount they might ask you to pay it now.

If you go on your hmrc portal, you can check your current tax year and what hmrc expect you to earn this year, and if it doesn't look right, you can submit a different number. They will then adjust your tax code to reflect what you have told them but it might take two or three weeks.

If you are willing to put the tax code they have put you on now on here I can tell you what it means.

Also - payroll teams generally aren't actually tax experts. They are just processors, they deal more with the mechanics of getting everyone on boarded & paid every month.

If you work for a big company, you may have a company tax manager (or even a whole team of them) in the finance department who's job is to look after the companies taxes as a whole. Your personal tax affairs aren't really their job, but they might be nice & help you work out whats gone wrong. This is what I do for a job and if any of our staff was in a pickle like this I'd have a look & help them as for me its quite easy.

Thank you for the updates. My company has been unhelpful, sadly. I really struggle with all of this and was looking for a recommendation for someone to help to resolve it.

There is not really enough information in the post to be of any help, but here goes:

HMRC will assume your annual earnings are 12x your monthly ones. So if you get a bonus, that might then lead them to assume you're going to earn £200k and need to lose your personal allowance. This situation generally leads to overpaid tax.

If you get a bonus in March that takes you over the £100k threshold then your tax code cannot be corrected in time and you will end up underpaying tax for that year.

If you start claiming your state pension and don't tell anyone you will also end up with a tax bill because it is taxable income just like your salary, and it is paid without any tax being deducted.

To make it correct going forward you can set up an account and there is a facility in there to inform HMRC of your expected earnings for the forthcoming tax year. Include all salary, benefits and pension income.

I don't understand why two local accountants were unable to help, but I would recommend finding another one! But they are not mind readers, if you want them to help they will probably want to be registered as your agent so they can speak to HMRC. And obviously it won't be free.

I work in tax and if you really wanted us to we would help with this (as would any accountant you went to) but we would charge and really if your only income is from employment taxed through PAYE you don't really need an accountant HMRC should be able to explain it and adjust your tax code to recoup the underpaid tax.

That said I know some people would rather just pay someone else to deal with it so if that's the case just shop around accountants for a quote.

Op says 2 accountants haven't been able to help - OP, have they tried and failed or have they declined to take on the work? It's expensive to engage a client now with obligatory money laundering checks, engagement letters and file set up, and to be honest some accountants may be looking at this and thinking it's not worth their while.
If you post where you live someone may have a recommendation but this is not the sort of job a national firm would be interested in - you need a small local one man band most likely.

I don’t really understand the forecast thing, tax codes don’t really work like that, if you are PAYE, regardless of whether your wages go up in the future, you would still be on the basic rate taxpayer tax code, which is something like 12 5L or whatever. You can Google it.

If your income is below £28k you could call the charity TaxAid. They deal with problems just like this regularly.

Do you get any kind of taxable benefit from your work, eg. private healthcare?

OP I think many of us here could probably give you some firm advice if you provide some more information.

Your tax code and annual income would make this clearer.

Yes, I could probably give you instructions to sort it.

Also to be honest if all you have is employment income from one job, hmrc will basically sort it for you eventually either you'll be asked to simply pay the tax owing, or they'll adjust your tax code to recover it over time from your pay. They may not get it exactly right immediately but over a year it will flush through.

This is not true. Are you a tax professional?

I am on paye. My code is not the standard one. The standard one assumes you have
a) no adjustments for previous years (eg amounts owed to hmrc being adjusted through your tax code
b) full personal allowance
c) no gaps in employment/job changes in the period

Hmrc can see from my monthly wage that i am expected to earn above £100k this year. So my tax code is changed to reduce the personal allowance I get.

I also had an adjustment last year because my employer declared a higher medical premium on my p11d, so I owed more tax in respect of that benefit in kind. So this was also adjusted in my tax code.

Lots of people in paye will have tax code adjustments.

I am a Payroll department manager, I'mm happy to have a look at your income/tax codes if you wish? (happy to DM and share my employer website with me shown on there so you can see I'm actually genuine too!) I dot need to see personal info on your payslips, will just ask you some Q's about the coding notices you have and direct you where to go to view the income and calculaitons.

As a Payroll Specialist I can tell you we are absolutely not ‘just processors’ and are highly skilled in PAYE and NIC calculations.

People who wrongly assume we are data inputters or just ‘press a button’ have no idea of the specifics of running an accurate payroll and this opinion absolutely belittles our profession.

Accountants are less likely to understand PAYE than a Payroll Professional and are more versed in personal tax and self-employment. Where it becomes complex is for people that have both, or are very high earners.

Underpayments through PAYE are highly unusual and generally result from an incorrect tax code produced by HMRC or incorrect information supplied by new starters (payroll do not produce/decide tax codes off their own backs). An established employee with correct tax code should have no reason to underpay tax.

As a Payroll Specialist I can tell you we are absolutely not ‘just processors’ and are highly skilled in PAYE and NIC calculations

Apologies, no offence intended - in my company (ftse 100) the "payroll team" are largely administrative. Outsource payroll providers run the actual calculations & deal with codes and if you contact "payroll" you do not get someone who understands paye or nic, you get an administrator who collects info from new joiners & provides it to the payroll outsource company. This is my main experience of "payroll".

By contrast the tax department within finance in a company usually includes employment tax specialists who deal with a massive range of paye & nic issues & are qualified chartered tax advisors.

My advice was really just intended to try signpost op to somewhere helpful in RL where she works that she might not have considered, since it sounded like she'd already exhausted her options in the payroll dept.

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