I have worked almost without interruption during the 5-year period I want to use as a qualifying period. However, one of my employers did not pay HMRC any tax or NI contributions on my behalf until 10 months after I had started working for them: is that going to be an issue?
My employers started overdeducting tax (at least 10% of my gross salary more than they should have) from month 1. I went to HR and explained they were applying the wrong tax code: they initially said there was no such thing as a tax code, then told me that they had to overdeduct tax as I was a foreigner and there was a risk I might ‘disappear’, going back to where I come from, and they could end up being charged by HMRC for taxes I had not paid elsewhere (???
). My managers did not want to get involved. I had to find new rental accommodation, so needed an employer reference, and didn’t want to rock the boat.I contacted HMRC who told me that I would have to wait until the end of the tax year, and they would send me a tax refund (after having been on hold for ages, I wanted to speed things up, so didn’t give them my NI number but just said I had a general query – how did I come to regret this). In April I didn’t get my P60 as HR ‘still had to calculate it’. I made a lot of fuss and eventually got my P60 with my May payslip. I sent it to HMRC who then came back to me with the news that they had never received any tax or NI contributions for me since I started working for that employer (so if I had lost my job, I wouldn’t have been able to claim JSA). When I called, the chap was very nice and told me that a) I wasn’t the only employee in that company in this situation; b) it wasn’t the first year my employers had done this.
After a lot of chasing from HMRC and myself, my employers eventually paid the backlog of Ni contributions and tax to HMRC in July. I got my refund cheque 2 weeks later.
I still have the correspondence from HMRC: should I include it with the payslips, and maybe add a covering letter? I am worried that if the officer dealing with my case checks my NI records, it will look to them as if I didn’t have a job for a whole 10 months. I also have a work contract, but it wasn’t signed by anyone at the company. Not surprisingly, I left as soon as I could find a job elsewhere.
Thanks in advance.
