Student Loan Consultation minutes

04 July 2014

HMRC have published the minutes of the meeting of the Collection of Student Loans consultation forum held on 3rd June 2014. These include updates on real time information and other topics.

The minutes include a question about employers who have not indicated in their final submission for 2013/14 that their return is complete. This question concerned a report that “10% of the returns due in April hadn’t ticked the submission to say that it was the final one. As a result it looked as if the tax year was incomplete. There has been no feedback on how the 10% will be treated; would they face penalties as they had not indicated that this was the final return? The Group were interested to know what the consequences would be; will a penalty be charged or will HMRC process the return as complete?”

HMRC have responded as follows:

“At the end of the tax year, when an employer submits their final RTI submission (FPS or EPS for the pay period) they must indicate that this is their ‘Final submission for the tax year’ and answer the end of year questions and declaration. Where employers don’t set this indicator and answer the end of year questions it will have a significant impact on some of our business processes. And employers have a statutory obligation to provide the details in the end of year declaration questions (Para 7, Schedule A1 to the PAYE regulations). So naturally, we expect all employers to comply with the law.

Employers who do not set this indicator and complete these questions but otherwise comply with all other obligations on time may not receive a filing penalty; but they will be missing an opportunity to demonstrate their lower tax risk status to HMRC and may find themselves more likely to be subject to Employer Compliance review as a consequence. “