claiming UK back taxes

Hi everyone. My husband and I are leaving the UK in less than two months. He is on an untaxed student bursary which he has supplemented by teaching extra courses at his school. His hourly pay is high but he only works five to ten hours per week. He has been consistently overtaxed- his last check, which he just received, had deducted  over £500 from £1800. He has an NI number, of course. His total pay for the year is under £5000 and he should be able to claim the taxes back, according to the tax office, but after several years of this (he is frankly stupid about paperwork, and I won't even talk about how bad I am) the amount owed has piled up. I am worried about whether he'll be able to claim the last batch back. Does anyone have any advice?

Hi Molly

To cut a long story short, I had expected to leave the country a few years ago, so decided to file a tax return to claim overpaid tax.

They said I had to file all the tax returns for the 4 tax years I had been here in order to claim overpaid tax for the first of those 4 years I was here.  But it was fine with them that I had to go back that far, and I even went into an Inland Revenue (as it was known then) office in central London and got to talk to a real live tax advisor after having gotten as far as I felt I could do by phone calls.

Long story short, I successfully filed the returns for all the years I had been here, and was paid a whopping £1000 in overpaid tax (I say whopping because it was only a case of having become a UK taxpayer in June of my first year, two months after the start of the tax year - all years since then I had been paying the right amount of tax).

My advice is to call the HMRC helpline and enlist their support, and follow through with it all, you could end up reclaiming lots of overpaid tax, making your efforts very well worthwhile!

The law has changed from 6 April 2008.

If he has non-UK income greater than £2,000 during the entire UK tax year, he will only qualify for the UK personal allowance if he declares his worldwide income in the UK.