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Questions From Our Forum 17/12/10
Friday, December 17th, 2010
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Personal mileage costs in Company Car
Some of our employees who have a Company Car have been provided with a company credit card to pay for their fuel. This means that they are using the fuel for business and private use. How do we make the employee pay for their private usage? I have suggested that they should record the starting and finshing mileage on their expense form each month and then we can deduct their business mileage (which they record) and then charge them for the remaining mileage as this would be personal usage. They would pay back at the current HMRC mileage rates.
However it is being argued that the Company will lose out and we should work out how much fuel they have put in then calculate the number and cost of business miles used, and then charge them (or pay them) the difference.
I don’t think this is correct as we are not actually recording the number of personal miles used, which i think we have to do.
Please can someone advise how it should be done and how anyone else is currently processing these payments.
Thank you.
Childcare vouchers whilst on SMP
Further to other questions on the same subject I am hoping that someone could help me with my query; my wife is already receiving Childcare vouchers and is due to start maternity in March. She will only be in receipt of SMP from this time.
I am aware that her employer may not reduce her SMP payments to cover the cost of Childcare vouchers but was hoping someone could explain if her employer is able to recover the cost from her salary upon returning to work? Would there have to be something in her terms and conditions stating that this would be the case? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Overpayments
In January 2009 (yes the monthly pay packet that pays the Christmas bills!) a large amount of tax was deducted from our wage packets (average 1/3 of that month’s pay) – no warning was given that a large amount of tax was going to be deducted. Our manager queried this when it was spotted with payroll and the explanation given was that we had all worked a lot of overtime and so we paid more tax (myself and another member of staff had only work a few extra hours at our usual hourly rate) so this obviously wasn’t the reason, but we were told that was the only answer we were getting!
When I spotted this I looked at all my previous pay slips and tallied up my tax and realised that what had happened was that payroll had not applied the abolition of the 10% starting rate of tax from the start of the 2008/09 tax year, and must have run a calculation at calendar year end and noticed the error.
I followed this up with the payroll lady to check if this was the reason for the claw back of tax, but as I recall was greeted with a very obstructive response that blamed the automated calculations made on the computer system. It is apparent that the aggressive response is their tactic to prevent any further questions being asked and making the employees feel like they are in the wrong!
Now of course this is fine, I want to pay the tax I owe, of course we all did – and we never did get an explanation – I now see that this is probably because they didn’t want to admit to it and it might not have been the correct way for them to address the matter but taking the tax back in the way they did.
I’m not trying to dredge up past misdemeanours – it would just be helpful for me to understand how this should actually have been handled. I understand that these situations can all be dealt with differently on an individual basis and there is not such thing as a standard answer but would really be interested as to how it should have been handled? Thanks!
