Went round to me mums for coffee & a nice home made fruit cake.
Then had to sort out my stepdads tax return. He receives a small german pension which differs from month to month depending on the exchange rate, so we have to complete a self assessment return every year.
A simple job you'd think except HMRC has changed the returns for 2025/26. Now bear in mind both Mrs L and I used to work for HMRC as trainers, it took over an hour to sort out. Here's one example of the stupidity of the system.
Question: Is your income for 2026/26 over £35,000? There are two answers, Yes and No. in our case, it's NO, so I tick the No box, get to the bottom of the page and an error message comes up. I go back to the page and the £35k qanswer has defaulted to Yes. I tick No. an error message comes up, go back a page and the £35k questio has again defaulkted to yes.
I select the help box below where it tells me to select No if the annual income is less than £35k., but if you select Yes, and your income is less than £35k your winter fuel allowance will not be recovered.
WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE EFFIN QUESTION?
In one of the sections to do with foreign income, all the questions were answered No. An erroe message came up stating if the section was not relevant, to delete it. I deleted it and the system deleted ALL of the foreign income section, not just the page in question. The question I got wrong was something like 'Did you receive any foreign dividend Got that one right the answer was No. what I missed was a box where I had to put in a figure for how much foreign dividend was received. I should have entered £0, leaving it blank or simply entering 0 wasn't good enough. Surely if the answer to the previous question was NO, why enter an amount?
There were many more 'double negative' questions in the foreign income page. No wonder neither of my parents who are both in their 80's could successfully submit the return when two ex HMRC trainers took over an hour to figure it out.
Anyway, the fruit cake was nice
