HMRC's 12,500 Erroneous Penalty Letters

It seems that HMRC's flagship RTI continues to be riddled with bugs and errors.

AccountingWeb reports that HMRC has sent about 12,500 penalty letters in error to employers who had filed their payroll returns for 2013 to 2014.

HMRC have stated that nearly 10% of penalty letters sent were to employers who had filed their PAYE information for the tax year ending 5 April 2014 because its computer system didn’t recognise returns had been submitted in four situations:

• A month 12 Full Payment Summary with zero financial values, declaring final submission for the year
• A month 12 Employer Payment Summary (EPS) with zero financial values, whether or not declaring final submission for the year
• A month 12 EPS claiming CIS deductions suffered
• An “Earlier Year Update” with zero financial values

HMRC have apologised for the inconvenience caused by the penalty notices sent in error.

Sadly this form of foul up does seem to be par for the course, in May I noted that 49% of automatic late VAT submission fines were incorrect.

Coincidently in 2012 HMRC sent out around 12,000 erroneous penalty notices to people told by HMRC that they didn't need to file a self assessment form (admittedly this was not an RTI issue, but placing trust in HMRC's automated systems to send out automatic fines does appear to be misplaced).

Luckily HMRC can't take money from bank accounts, yet!

Anyhoo the fix, to resolve this problem, will seemingly be implemented by the end of August. 

HMRC state:

“We are also updating all the employer records involved, and no further action is needed by employers."

Has anyone received one of these erroneous penalty letters?

Tax does have to be taxing.

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