{"id":12479,"date":"2023-11-20T08:40:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T08:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxpolicy.org.uk\/?p=12479"},"modified":"2023-11-20T15:09:14","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T15:09:14","slug":"hicbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heacham.neidles.com\/2023\/11\/20\/hicbc\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s worse than a 71% marginal tax rate? Penalising 19,000 people who don’t understand it."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The UK’s high marginal tax rates on people earning \u00a350k are a disincentive to work. They’re made worse by the way a large chunk of the tax is collected – the “high income child benefit charge” (HICBC). <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The HICBC creates a “tax trap” for employees who usually wouldn’t file a tax return. If they earn \u00a350k, and they or their partner claims child benefit, they have an immediate requirement to file and pay the HICBC. It’s easy to get that wrong. In the last four years 19,000 did, and were hit with a penalty of up to 30%.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tax systems shouldn’t have marginal rates of over 70%, and shouldn’t have “traps” that can catch the unwary. The HICBC should be abolished. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Financial Times covered this story over the weekend<\/a><\/strong>, and there was more on marginal rates in Saturday’s Times<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chart above shows the marginal rate of income tax paid by a UK taxpayer with three children under 18. That’s a 71% marginal tax rate between \u00a350k and \u00a360k.1<\/a><\/sup>It’s not even the most extreme example – student loan repayments can take the rate to 77%.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The high marginal rate results from George Osborne’s 2013 decision to withdra<\/a>w<\/a> child benefit<\/a> from people earning a “high income” – \u00a350,000. If the \u00a350k threshold had been upgraded with inflation it would be \u00a367,000 now – but it wasn’t. Around one in three households now include someone earning \u00a350,000 – it’s not a “high income”.<\/p>\n\n\n

How the HICBC works<\/h2>\n\n\n

Whatever we think of the politics of withdrawing child benefit from “high earners”, the way that it was done was a mess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

UK tax generally applies to individuals.2<\/a><\/sup>That didn’t used to be the case – until 1988, the income of a married woman was taxed as if it belonged to her husband<\/a>, on his tax return. Married women had no financial privacy.<\/span> I’m taxed on my income; my wife is taxed on hers. The benefits system on the other hand, looks at overall household income and capital<\/a>. The decision was taken to withdraw child benefit based on a mixture of both – if the highest earner in a household hit \u00a350,000 then child benefit would start to be clawed back, and if it hit \u00a360,000 then all child benefit would be withdrawn.3<\/a><\/sup>There are a number of cases where it’s more complicated than this. For example: where the high earning parent doesn’t know if the other parent claims child benefit, or where child benefit is claimed by someone outside the household but who provides the household with financial support. I’m going to ignore these issues for now, but they’re important for the people affected.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge was that, whilst HMRC knows how much I earn, it doesn’t have a way to see how much the highest earning person in my household earns. So child benefit couldn’t “automatically” be clawed back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The highly bureaucratic answer to this challenge was to outsource all the work to taxpayers. Osborne created a new tax – the HICBC – and required people to self-assess it in their tax return. It’s a bad answer because most people earning \u00a350,000 are employees, and don’t file a tax return. So people would have to realise they had to start filing a tax return just because they claimed “too much” child benefit, and notify HMRC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was very foreseeable this would cause problems, and many said so at the time<\/a>. There’s an excellent briefing on the HICBC<\/a> from the wonderful House of Commons Library.<\/p>\n\n\n

The HICBC choices<\/h2>\n\n\n

If your household has children under 18 and someone earning \u00a350k, then you have three choices:<\/p>\n\n\n\n