Tax credit delay for families
The chancellor's decision to abolish the married couples tax allowance means self-employed couples will pay £442 extra in tax this year, according to the Daily Telegraph.
By abolishing the married couples tax allowance and implementing childrens’ tax credit last April, Gordon Brown changed the way families are taxed.
Couples on a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) tax code will benefit from tax credits worth £1.8bn a year from April 2001, while self-employed couples will pay twice as much income tax up front, and will only receive tax credits, after filing their self-assessment tax forms, in summer 2002.
Oliver Letwin, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury said the new system was government’s way of ‘fiddling the figures’ to create the illusion of a reduced tax burden.
But a spokesperson for the Inland Revenue said: ‘It is not that they won’t get the credit, but they will claim it when they fill out a self-assessment form at the end of the tax year.’