Happy New Year.

Today marks the first full day back after the holidays for many people.

Tax fines
31st January is the final deadline for submission of a 2013 tax return, after that there is an automatic £100 fine – even if someone is due a tax refund.

The penalties for not submitting a tax return on time can mount up to £1600 or more now, and HMRC have been enforcing these for several years.

There is still time to complete and submit the return, so if you know of anyone who has put it off until now please do put them in touch – the professional fees for getting help could actually be much less than the fines for not submitting the return.

Future Tax Developments
As promised last month, here is the link to an article I have written that covers points I discussed from my presentation at Denbies Vineyard:

Plans to simplify National Insurance

In addition I also talked about the possibility of combining tax and national insurance into one amount, however this does appear unlikely as it has been mentioned for many years.

What is likely to happen though is Agent Registration via HMRC’s Tax Agent Strategy. This will see agents given greater access to HMRC’s systems – enabling tasks such as issuing new tax codes to be undertaken by the agent. I will be sharing more details of this as things develop.

The next taxhelp.uk.com event
Following on from the success of our last event, the date of the next one has now been finalised for Tuesday 4th March.

The event will be held at the Holiday Inn Guildford, and will run from 4 – 6pm.

In addition to myself I will have several other speakers, look out for more details and your invitation in the coming weeks.

I will be in touch again next month – in the meantime please do join me on social media (the links are in the footer) as I share tax tips and advice more frequently there.