Foreign Perspectives

Since the economy has taken something of a dive there are a lot more people around these days who are overpaying on their taxes, typically this can happen if your income this year is a lot less than last year but there are a variety of other reasons why you can end up with a tax bill that’s lots more than you were expecting.

Sometimes the biggest surprise is in terms of back taxes. Although you’d think that these can’t be much, it’s surprising just how large a bill you can get from this quarter. For instance, often seemingly small omissions can amount to quite serious amounts of cash owed if they’re over a number of years. This tax debt can even reach such levels that you need to look into the options of paying it off in installments which at least could reduce the payments to more manageable amounts.

On the other side of the coin people can also find that there are quite substantial tax reliefs which they’ve not claimed. You might think that if you’ve an accountant that this just can’t happen to you but, in most cases, the accountant doesn’t get out to actually see what you’re getting up to and you could be pleasantly surprised if they’ve completely overlooked an ongoing tax relief. Just as in the case of underpayments, missing out on relatively small amounts of tax relief can add up to a sizeable chunk of cash when counted over a few years.

Whether it’s over or under payments that affect you, it’s best to do something about them rather than taking the head in the sand approach that many people adopt when thinking about taxes.