Mysterious update of 2019 tax returns received today.

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Grizzly

Registered User
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Today I received in the post an updated PAYE Balancing Statement for the year 2019 from Revenue.

They are saying that I have underpaid for 2019 in the amount of €350 and that I now owe this amount.

I rang them and they say that the Dept. of Social Welfare updated their records with them for 2019 recently. Saying that I was on Illness Benefit. I wasn't, I was retired (aged 67) and on full State Pension in 2019............ so no illness benefit.

I know I would have submitted a correct return for 2019 at the time and the revenue would have their own figures at the time to confirm that this was correct.

I am not sure that I have retained paperwork from 2019.

How do I prove that their updated figures are incorrect from Social Welfare and can the revenue go back 5 years and now make a claim?
 
Might be a scam. Did you ring a number on the letter, or a public number for Revenue.
 
Contact Social Protection and ask them if you were receiving illness benefit in 2019.
 
Just contact Revenue and make a complaint. Stating you were on the full state pension, so that Social Welfare claim is impossible.
There is no love lost between Welfare and Revenue.
 
Towger said:
Just contact Revenue and make a complaint. Stating you were on the full state pension
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I did. They say that they have received this update from social welfare and it automatically changes my 2019 statement and a new update is issued.
I was told that I have to contact social welfare myself, because they can't do it.

Almost a full morning lost already, making phone calls and digging out paperwork and bank statements from 2019. Just as well I kept them, albeit scattered about the place.
 
Is there a possibility that you claimed the Covid-19 pandemic payment in addition to a pension payment? I know they've been recently going over the pandemic payment records and issuing letters to people that may owe tax.

I don't think it applies to you because the pandemic payment should only apply to tax years from 2020 onward - thought I'd mention it just in case (and because it may be useful to others that may come across this thread questioning their own return updates).

Did you retire in 2019 are were you already retired before 1st January 2019? Did you have additional income to report in 2019? I ask because everyone is entitled to certain credits and additional income reported in 2019 may not have been taxed correctly if the correct figure for pension income wasn't reported on the return. I doubt any of this applies - just throwing out possibilities even though the most likely thing is a mistake on their end.
 
I would advise everyone who receives a Social Welfare payment to check their figures and not to assume that their figures are correct.

A few years back my wife went from Illness Benefit to Invalidity Pension to State Pension all in the space of six months.

Trying to get each department to issue a letter stating the benefit she received was a nightmare. For some reason trying to get figures from 1st January to 31st December proved very difficult.

Illness Benefit section could only tell me their payments. They had no access to the Invalidity Pension payments. So that required a separate phone call. For some reason Invalidity Pension claimed Illness Benefits payments as theirs and returned them to the Revenue as theirs, despite the fact that the Illness Benefit section also returned them to the Revenue. So she ended up being taxed twice on the one payments.

I ended up going through our bank statements and listed each individual payment received to help them with their figures.

On top of that it takes weeks and weeks for them to do anything.
 
Laramie said:
Trying to get each department to issue a letter stating the benefit she received was a nightmare. For some reason trying to get figures from 1st January to 31st December proved very difficult.
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These type of payments are usually quite visible on the Social Protection section of a mygovid.ie account which is why I recommended viewing them there. Were you not able to view them individually? As they close off each payment they post the closure and the opening of the new payment.

On the Revenue section one can view the full details of what Social Protection submitted to them which is handy.
 
I have received the same for my wife who transferred from illness benefit to invalidity pension back then. The invalidity pension was backdated to the date she applied the previous year and she was taxed as if she had received both at the same time. Back then after phoning revenue I had to contact illness benefit for a statement and then contact invalidity pension department for the same and I remember the very helpful lady l that I dealt with telling me that this double taxation happened regularly. I sorted all this back then after going through my wifes bank statements . I will phone revenue some morning next week as they only answer phones before 1pm. To make things worse my wife passed away suddenly 3 months ago and the statements for 2019 and 2020 are mailed to her represtentavities.
 
Grizzly said:
I rang them and they say that the Dept. of Social Welfare updated their records with them for 2019 recently. Saying that I was on Illness Benefit. I wasn't, I was retired (aged 67) and on full State Pension in 2019............ so no illness benefit.
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I find it quite staggering that it took the Department of Social Protection about four and a half years to transfer this information (be it right or wrong) electronically to the Revenue Commissioners. (Of course it's even more staggering if you didn't receive any Illness Benefit from them in 2019!)

Something doesn't seem right; I suggest that you seek clarification/complain here.
 
Miller22 said:
The invalidity pension was backdated to the date she applied the previous year and she was taxed as if she had received both at the same time
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Snap.

My wife's Invalidity commenced in November. She only started getting the payment in February of the following year. She was then given a lump sum of the arrears due, in March, backdated to the previous November.

However the letter she received from Invalidity Pensions section for tax purposes showed that the payments commenced when she was approved in November, which they didn't.

As a result she was taxed correctly for the Illness Benefit that she was receiving but also taxed for the Invalidity Pension that she was not receiving from November to February.
 
There is a difference between when a payment was approved and when that payment commenced.

If it crosses two tax years then this appears to be causing problems.

From reading the above posts, it appears that someone in the Invalidity Pension section is issuing letters to the Revenue stating that Invalidity Pension payments commenced as soon as they were approved......not when they actually started.

So, some individuals are being shown as receiving an amount from Illness Benefit and an amount from Invalidity Pension at the same time. When in fact the second payment only happened when one ended.

If Social Welfare is issuing incorrect internal letters to the Revenue, not showing the actual payment dates but approved payment dates then lots of people could be losing out. Many people who are approaching retirement dates aged 65 and 66 can be in receipt of mixed payments so it is essential that the internal notification between departments is correct.

I would be concerned that when a person looks at the Social Protection mygovid.ie website, that it appears they are shown the correct information. The payments might be shown correctly but is the information (actual payments) that is being issued to the Revenue from the Social Protection department correct.

This has been a problem for me in the past. If Social Protection have difficulty in giving me this information in paper form what information is being passed internally between departments.
 
Revenue work strictly on a when paid principal, when money is earned or should have been paid is irrelevant to them.

Social Welfare appear to do all sorts of messing. Mainly working on a when earned basis. I have seen all sorts of messing from them, such as the guts of a years worth of Illness Benefits dumped into Employers bank account in January, with no written communications. Employee ended up owning several thousand in tax for a tax year they never received the money.
 
Marsupial said:
I find it quite staggering that it took the Department of Social Protection about four and a half years to transfer this information (be it right or wrong) electronically to the Revenue Commissioners
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If someone pressed a button in error to send this information to the Revenue four years later then it is probably causing a lot of people a lot of headaches.

Most people have moved on. We have even had Covid in the meantime.

Lots of us will not have kept records since 2019.

A lot of people will just assume that the information is correct and carry on. However, we see from the above posts that the information might not be correct.

In my case I do remember trying to deal with the Department of Social Protection during the years before I started receiving the State Pension and it was a nightmare.

I remember one year receiving three different letters from Social Protection all with different amounts for benefits received (from the same department).

Is there some sort of investigation of payments paid out in 2019 taking place or are individuals being targeted, I wonder......or did someone just press a button?
 
As a general principle the state shouldn’t be seeking tax with unreasonable delay.

Four years is ridiculous and suggests a big failure in public administration.
 
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