"Get off your Backsides" and register HMRC Boss tells higher rate taxpayers

'Get off your backsides' and register to avoid a fine over child benefit, HMRC boss tells 200,000 higher rate taxpayers
Hundreds of thousands of higher rate taxpayers who have claimed child benefit need to “get off their backsides” and register for self-assessment by tomorrow to avoid a fine, the head of HM Revenue and Customs has said.

Lin Homer, the HMRC chief executive, said: 'We think there is about 200,000 people who still need to get off their backsides and do something.' Photo: GETTY
By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent
11:42AM BST 04 Oct 2013
157 Comments
Lin Homer, chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs, said that if people were not sure if they needed to they should register anyway.

Higher income parents have until midnight on Saturday night to submit their details with the Taxman or face fines running into hundreds of pounds.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, scrapped child benefit for households where the highest earner has a salary of £60,000 or more in last year’s Budget.

Households with someone earning above £50,000 lose a proportion of the benefit under the change that came in on January 7 this year.

Higher income parents have to opt out of receiving the money or fill in a self-assessment form so HMRC can calculate how much benefit they need to take back.

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Miss Homer said: “As it turned out a lot of the people affected have either opted out, over 350,000, or have already opted out, or were already in self-assessment, over 425,000.

“And since we started out advertising another 130,000 have joined. So we think there is about 200,000 people who still need to get off their backsides and do something.”

HMRC can levy fines up to the total amount of child benefit received between January 7 and April 5 this year.

But she said that the HMRC did not want to impose penalties simply because they had failed to take action in time.

She said: “For those people who have not taken action yet … please register for self-assessment. If it proves not to be necessary we can always take you out.

“What we don’t want people is face penalties just because they have been inactive.”