To register as Self Employed for the sake of 3 hours a week?

[DoodleNoo]

I need some advice from someone who knows about tax / employment issues!

I've recently taken on a 3 hours/week cleaning job for a local charity. They pay me with a cheque at the end of each month - it's just over £100/ month, so pretty minimal, certainly well below any tax threshold. I assume the payment comes out of their petty cash, I don't get any payslips or other paper work, just the cheque in an envelope.

BUT I've now had my Student Loan deferral forms come though and Census Form too, and know it won't be long until the Child Tax Credits ones follow - and I don't know how to fill them in with regard to the job. My £100 /month salary won't affect my student loan or probably the tax credits - but I really don?t feel comfortable lying on official forms and saying I'm not working when I am.

A friend suggested I could register as self employed, then invoice the charity for hours worked - but then surely I'd have to do a tax return and file business records which seems like a lot of effort for my minimal income. And would I need to set up a company? I don-t want to put the charity to hassle / liability as I'm so pleased to have the job; the previous cleaner worked for them in this way for about 20 years without comment.

If I were paid in cash, I'd probably be more inclined not to say anything, but as I get a cheque with both my name and the organization's details on it every month I feel as if there is hard evidence of my role with them, were anyone at the tax office to investigate.

Any thoughts on how to handle this? Am I being paranoid?

Look on the inland revevenue website.
You don't need to file business records though you would most likely need to do a tax return - though I promise you with that amt of money each month will be very straight forward.

There is no hassle for the company - although you could give them an invoice each month ( hand written) so no big deal.

Have you discussed insurance liability - if something happened either by you ( accident) and you broke something or if you had an accident on the premises are you insured as I would be a bit worried about that.

Just because its a charity don't assume they will be really 'nice' about things if something did happen.

Only other thing is that you will need to play NI if you are registered self employed (£31 ish per quarter) that you may otherwise not be paying

As long as your self employed income is less than about £5,000, you can get an exemption from paying Class 2 NI (which is about £2 a week - possibly a little more now). Although if you aren't paying NI in any other way, it is not a bad thing to be paying it.

Thanks Bonkers & Lawrie - sounds pretty sraightforward. I'll talk to my employers and see what they think.