The Lemon Fool

A less 'technical' question, related to previous thread.

Mrs D completed and submitted her 2022/3 return online last week. All straightforward until she reached the 'foreign income' question, when the system repeatedly expressed its scepticism that she entered 'nil'. She then saw a red ink notice at the top of the page intimating a more polite equivalent of 'Are you quite sure ? We think you're lying'. It took three goes for the system to accept her nil entry.

Poor Mrs D has never had any foreign income. Occasional rental income, CGT etc but absolutely nothing foreign. I've held a few W-BENs in the past, but not her, and my holdings were in the distant past ISAs anyway.

Is this just another of the apparently many algorhythmic glitches, or might there be something else going on ? She is hoping an entirely fruitless and unnecessary investigation isn't on the cards.

Thanks for any insight

Dove

Dove21 wrote:A less 'technical' question, related to previous thread.

Mrs D completed and submitted her 2022/3 return online last week. All straightforward until she reached the 'foreign income' question, when the system repeatedly expressed its scepticism that she entered 'nil'. She then saw a red ink notice at the top of the page intimating a more polite equivalent of 'Are you quite sure ? We think you're lying'. It took three goes for the system to accept her nil entry.

Ah! I am familiar with this sort of thing. (As you have found you can eventually force it)

In such a case the online HMRC system does not accept 'nil' or even 'zero' (0). It has to be 'Null'. i.e. Make no entry in the box.

Why was the system even looking for an entry under foreign income? Perhaps "Yes" had been answered to the question "Do you have any foreign income?" when going through the start of the return?

Somewhere at the begining of the process you have ticked "Yes" to foreign income, or more likely failed to tick "No"

Rob

XFool wrote:In such a case the online HMRC system does not accept 'nil' or even 'zero' (0). It has to be 'Null'. i.e. Make no entry in the box.

It can be seriously frustrating if there's been an entry made and you want to remove it or set it to zero. I think using the delete key is the only option.

robbelg wrote:Somewhere at the begining of the process you have ticked "Yes" to foreign income, or more likely failed to tick "No"

Rob

Why paid for software is a godsend, when getting to stage close to end TaxCalc flags where I have been contradictory and gives a fast link to the earlier page that may need correcting, this makes both accounts and tax returns a whole lot easier than intuitively trying to work out where the data entry error/contradiction is likely to be.