HMRC blamed for deluge of P45 requests
The taxman is churning out unnecessary requests for 'unsubmitted' P45s, a payroll consultant has claimed
The government has revealed in a freedom of information request that it
generated seven million P43s in the past two years. P43s are effectively
requests to refile a P45, on the basis that the original has been lost or not
sent.
Matt Boyle, a tax consultant with Research-4-PAYE, said the chances of
employers failing to send the original P45s was ‘remote’, arguing that the high
number revealed a level of extraordinary inefficiency.
He blamed HMRC for failing to match the P45s with the employee’s details, or
‘it has just lost them’. If a payroll clerk spent half an hour resending a
former employee’s tax information, at an hourly rate of £10, UK businesses had
spent £17.5m a year resending P45 details to HMRC, he estimated.
HMRC said: ‘ There are a number of reasons why HMRC would request a P43. It’s
complete nonsense to say that the figures in the FOI answer represent P45s lost
by HMRC.’