Taxation: Overpayments
The question
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many (a) people and (b) businesses have positive tax balances with HMRC due to overpayments of tax broken down by tax type; what the total value of those balances are; and (i) how many accounts and (ii) the total balances in those accounts will be held over into future tax years.
Answered by James Murray
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) does not hold readily available summary information on taxpayers with positive tax balances.
Several regimes require taxpayers to make payments on account or settle tax liabilities ahead of filing returns, and subsequent to filing returns, claims for reliefs or notification of a change in circumstances may further impact amounts repayable to taxpayers.
For these reasons the time taken to extract information on positive balances from the various databases and to produce and quality assure the data to answer the questions would be disproportionate on cost grounds.
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