Ron Hickman dies

EIOE seems to have got his measure. That post appeared here as:-

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Which makes more sense than usual.

Well this accountant has made me a lot more in the past so he is always forgiven.

But next year I'll D-I-Y the bloody thing.

:-)

Top marks.

Trouble is the UK tax system is so bloody complicated that DIY-ing the tax return is not so easy. Whereas in the US it used to take me about an hour, once a year.

My accountants bill was £175 - but since he saved me £320 at the stroke of a pen I didn't mind :-)

Capital gains is the worst aspect. the income is not too hard.

Trying to woprk outm, which, of many rferwent buy/sell episodes of differing stock block sizes, constitutes a gain or loss is ..challenging.

When frequent trading was costing me more in accountants fees than it made, I stopped.. Now it's just ' buy a block, hold, sell a block' as opportunities arise, or buy and hold a block for several years..

If you're self employed, a decent accountant will know what expenses the IR will accept without question. DIYing it means they are more likely to quibble.

Doing it inside a self select ISA takes away all of the CGT related pain...

You have really no idea. A sycophant.

IME they will also know which expensed you can "make up" without then quibbling :-(

tim

Can be swings and roundabouts. Some expenses you may think legitimate aren't allowed by the IR. And they may allow some you'd not thought of. Hence the beauty of a decent accountant.

I really was talking about genuinely made up expenses

tim

HMRC sent me a letter here in Australia reminding me that I had to submit a return by the due date. I wrote to them pointing out I had lived here since

The free HMRC online facility is not available to those living outside the UK so I ended up having to pay £20 for TaxCalc so as to be able to submit a nil return. Hopefully I won't have to repeat this next year, but didn't see any question in TaxCalc re 2010-11 income.

If you want to DIY, I can recommend TaxCalc

Could you not have downloaded the online PDF form, filled it in, and posted it? That's what I did. Or had you gone past the 'do-it-by-post' deadline?

If you re-read carefully, that's what he said.

But it doesn't make sense to say that "because the due date [for the paper return] had passed, he needed to file online". Because not everyone is computer literate and has access to a computer, it follows that not everyone *can* file online. Therefore HMRC *must* accept paper returns even after the paper return deadline, in the same way as they will obviously accept online returns after the online deadline. The only difference is that late returns attract a penalty. So what? The penalty is reduced to zero if the tax due is zero.

It seems highly dubious that if HMRC disallow direct computer access from abroad for online filing in the normal way, that they should nevertheless allow access from abroad using a third party product. But perhaps taxcalc doesn't speak to HMRC directly at all. Perhaps it just collates all the necessary information using a "friendly" interactive interface, and then simply prints out an HMRC-compatible paper form with all the fields filled in, ready to be signed and posted.

In other words, perhaps taxcalc is just a sweetener which takes some of the drudgery out of filling paper forms in by hand, and perhaps our Tony is one of those people to whom filling in paper forms is worse than nursing a hangover, but is quite happy to get the job done by playing with a computer. Even if it takes longer and costs more.

I'm one as well, perhaps we should have a special name :-)

I don't think that it disallows access, what they may do is not post out the PIN code to other than UK addresses.

tim

I think that the online filing system for IT is just wonderful (if you ignore the fact that it's collecting something that you'd rather not pay)

tim