Joint Assessment/ Self employed

Hi everyone,

I got married in April 2006. I have always been separately assessed. This year I filed a Form 12 as I had a rental loss and also claimed Top Slicing relief....now I wished I had never contacted Revenue!

First I received a form to elect whether I wanted to be jointly assessed, separately assessed or treated as single people. Myself and my husband duly signed and returned the letter ticking separate assessment.

Since then my husband has received a new TFA cert giving him a 'married income one earner' allowance of €44,000 (presumably as I'm self employed now and they are assuming I'm unemployed as I've fallen out of the tax system until I do my next return). On top of that they assigned €9K of these tax allowances to 'other income' - apparantly because he holds a PSV licence (licence to drive a public service vehicle) !

THEN this morning he gets a cheque from them - they have apparantly decided to give him a portion of my Form 12 tax repayment...

There are so many issues I don't even know where to begin. Apparantly now we have missed the deadline for being separately assessed this year so we are stuck with being jointly assessed...despite the fact that we have never been and have never elected to be jointly assessed....

Is all this normal or am I just having a tough time of it this week so far???

Z

It makes no sense from the viewpoint of tax efficiency for you to be separately assessed. Why do you want this?

We both pay tax at the higher rate so my understanding is that there are no benefits to being jointly assessed unless one spouse is taxed at the lower rate or has unused allowances?

But there is no penalty either as far as I know.

I agree so there was never any point in being assessed jointly...and especially now that I'm self employed it's easier if we maintain separate tax records....but the Revenue seem insistent on dragging my poor hubbie into my tax affairs (although I realise I'm quite lucky he told me about the cheque he received from Revenue...I know a lot of husbands who would have banked it and said nuthin!)

As I said above, it makes no sense for you to be separately assessed. It just means more administration for the tax office, and hence a greater risk of confusion and mistakes. I can't understand why you seem to be hell-bent on separate assessment. Joint assessment is a far better option and in practically all cases has no downside.

You say you are self-employed but you say elsewhere that you filed a Form 12 tax return - should you not have filed a TR1 when registering initially as self-employed and annual Form 11 returns thereafter?

Hi there,

Yes U - I filed a Form 12 for last year as I was employed til end of Dec07. I have registered using TR1 so my next return will be a Form 11. I'm not totally against joint assessment - if the Revenue would stop fiddling with our tax allowances and taking it upon themselves to refund my husband some of my taxes - but its worked fine up until now with separate assessment so if it ain't broke....