Short Form 11P

Overall these short forms are good and the Revenue will do your assessment!

There seems to be a problem however with the two years. They offer to do your assessment for 2013 but still ask for a preliminary amount for 2014. So you can get them to work out 2013 but have to do 2014 yourself and send in the money at the same time as asking them for the 2013 figure??

If you complete and return the form by August 31st, you do not have to complete the self assessment panel (Panel O) and complete the tax calculation. Revenue will do this for you and I assume make an assessment of tax and send it to you in time to pay by October 31st. You should be able to deal with your preliminary tax at that point.

See the Revenue Guide to Completing your Tax return, and in particular p61
http://www.revenue.ie/en/tax/it/leaflets/guide-pay-file.pdf

For your own benefit, I would try to use the ROS Offline Application to make a calculation - I think mistakes often occur with the manual returns - if you have an offline calculation it will help you track down any errors quickly when the assessment issues.

Cheers, my point was this is convenient for 2013 but there is no convenience for 2014 really??

What convenience do you want?!

Just to clarify - you send must send in Form 11E or Form 11P by August 31st in order for Revenue to calculate your tax. If you send it in after this time, you will need to make the calculation and sign the self assessment panel (Panel O) yourself.

Having sent in your form by August 31st, Revenue send out your assessment for 2013 (sometime in September or October) stating that your liability for that year was for instance €5,000. You then pay the balance of tax owed for 2013 and preliminary tax for 2014 (based on their assessment amount) by October 31st.

Your safe harbour for preliminary tax is to match the previous year's liability. Otherwise you need to pay 90% of the current year liability, so guess work is involved.

If you underpay preliminary tax, Revenue can impose interest on the underpaid amount, from due date to date of payment. The current interest rate charged is c. 8% p.a.

If you are paying any sort of significant amount of tax you should be using the ROS Offline Application to make the calculation and compare this calculation to your assessment. If you can't do it yourself, it's probably money well spent to pay somebody qualified to do so.

I suppose the point is really a PR one, Revenue make a bog deal of calculating your liability if you fill out a basic form. This is attractive for those with occasional and/or limited self employed income. The advantage I think is very limited if you have to calculate or even estimate the 2014 figure. My point is *Revenue* present this as a big deal, I'm not so convinced.

What would you prefer then?

The conventional wisdom is that most people pay in preliminary tax, the 100% of prior year liability. Since as you say, nobody (least of all a 3rd party like Revenue) can easily estimate the current year's liability less than 10mths through the year.

So if you've got them willing to indulge your reluctance to join the 21st century and use software for calculation & filing, and calculate the figure for you, which as per the above is also the normal basis for estimating preliminary tax, I'm not sure what else you'd want?

Would it not be a big deal if they wouldn't calculate it for you and you had to get out a calculator or learn how to download and use the software...?

I don't think Revenue make a big deal of it (doing the calculation). The only reason they highlight the need to complete the form by August 31st is that they need time to turnaround the forms to get assessments back out to individuals so that they will meet their payment deadline of October 31st.

The paper return is ball-ache for all concerned - time consuming to complete and process - with no certainty given because a tax calculation isn't produced.

For people with occasional or limited self employed or limited, I'd suggest either up get to speed with the ROS software - which is pretty user friendly, or get someone else to do it - it's not going to cost much money to get a straightforward return done - agree the fee up front and use the time you would have spent fretting over the return to make some money for yourself!