Moneybox
May 1999
I'm not sure if my employer is paying my tax and NI. How can I find out?
The telltale signs of employers not intending to honour their legal responsibility to deduct and pay tax and National Insurance on your behalf can be spotted early on. Their agreement to do so should be written into your contract. If they refuse to include this they are not intending to pay tax for you and you should not agree to work for them.
The first step in your employer paying your tax and NI is registering with the Inland Revenue and having a unique PAYE scheme reference number. If they are not registered they cannot be paying your tax since they have no mechanism through which to do so!
Then they are required by law to provide you with regular weekly or monthly payslips which clearly show the tax and employees' NI deducted from your gross wage to arrive at your net wage. Receiving payslips which include these deductions at least shows that they (or a payroll service or accountant on their behalf) are calculating your deductions. It is likely that they are paying these over to the Inland Revenue, but they are only required to do so on a quarterly basis, so if you have only just started working for them they may not yet have paid any tax or NI for you.
If you want to check whether your tax/NI deductions are being paid, ask them for the reference number and tax office for their PAYE scheme. Any refusal to provide this would suggest that they have not set up a PAYE scheme for your employment.
Your final resort would be to ring your local tax office and ask for the phone number of the tax office that covers your employers’ address. Then give your National Insurance number which will enable the tax office to tell you if they have a record of your being currently employed by the family you work for. If not, they may ask you when you started work for your employer and write to your employer requesting information about their employment of you.
This will force them to declare your employment. They will be required by the Inland Revenue to pay tax and NI retrospectively, which is worth pursuing, even if you are no longer working for them, since the NI contributions paid during your working life affect your entitlement to a pension and other state benefits.
If your employer intends to pay your tax and NI but never quite finds time to do the necessary paperwork – a common occurrence! – they can use a fixed fee specialist payroll service such as Nannytax.