**Four** **reasons to submit your tax return early**

If you are completing a self assessment tax return for the first time or you are well versed in completing your tax returns annually, being organised in time for the 31 January deadline each year may fill you with dread.
If this sounds like you, why not complete your tax return now to avoid undue stress leading up to Christmas and the start of a new year?
**Here are four very good reasons why it makes sense to complete your tax return early.**

Reason 1: Buy yourself time to pay your tax

Did you know that if you get ahead of the game and complete your tax return early, any tax you are liable to pay is not due until the deadline of 31 January?

In theory, you could file your tax return as early as April, after the tax year-ends, and any tax you are due does not need to be paid until the deadline. This in effect gives you ten months at least to buy yourself time to save and pay for your tax bill.

The alternative of filing in January close to the deadline could mean you are caught out and may not have all the funds to pay the tax due on time, and HMRC will charge an immediate £100 fine.

Reason 2: easily Avoid HMRC penalties

If you complete your tax return in the nick of time for the 31 January deadline and you are late paying the tax due for any reason, HMRC will penalise you with:

A £100 if you miss the January 31st deadline
An additional £10-per-day fines (for up to 90 days) if you haven’t filed by 30th April
An additional £300 fine (or 5% of the tax you owe – whichever is greater) if you still haven’t filed your return after another 90 days
Another £300 fine (or 5% of the tax you owe – whichever is greater) if you still haven’t filed within a year
Additional penalties – including up to 100% of owed tax – if HMRC believes you are intentionally delaying your filing

Worst case scenario, you could be penalised for thousands of pounds if you do not submit your tax return to HMRC, even if you have nothing to declare in the tax year and submit a zero return.

Reason 3: Are you due a tax refund?

If you think you may be due a tax refund or you may have overpaid in tax earlier in the tax year, it is worth your while completing your tax return as soon as possible after the tax year ends, from April onwards, to work out what tax refund you are due from HMRC.
If you are indeed due a tax refund, you can submit your tax return as soon as possible after April and HMRC will pay you back any overpaid tax pretty quickly, usually within a few weeks.
This may help much needed cash flow whilst running your business day to day.

Reason 4: You need to file every quarter from April 2026

You may have heard of Making Tax Digital? This is HMRC’s plan to make all filing of taxes digital, and is already being phased in currently for VAT registered businesses.

If you need to complete a tax return, from April 2023 you will need to file not once but fives times a given tax year and via a digital platform. This equates to a filing every quarter plus an end of year filing statement summarising all the data provided over the four quarters of the year and adjusting where appropriate.

This means that if you are struggling now to complete a tax return once a year, you may want to instill good habits now to ready yourself for this major change of tax reporting coming your way very soon.

We take the pain out of Self Assessments

Whether you want to get more organised and are convinced filing early is the way to go for you, or you are looking for some support to file your tax return correctly due to your unique circumstances, or even if you want to get ahead of the curve for when Making Tax Digital arrives and get an advisor on side, Mirandus can help.

Every year we help our existing clients as well as one off requests with filing self assessment tax returns and the earlier you contact us, the more likely we will be able to help. We cannot 100% guarantee that we can meet every request to file a tax return that comes to us in January, but we always try to accommodate every request.

Contact us now to get organised and prepared well ahead of the 31 January deadline -we take the pain out of self assessments and will guide you throughout the process.

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