EM3965 - Concluding the Enquiry: Non-Contract Settlements: Allocating general payments on account

EM1936 says that ‘As soon as you have established that there is additional tax and NICs due, but you have not yet completed your enquiries, you should normally ask for a payment on account - unless the circumstances in EM1940 apply.’

Where a general payment on account has been made during the course of the enquiry it will be held in SAFE, see EM1938.

Before you settle an enquiry by final closure notice, or complete matters by partial closure notice, you should ask the SAFE nominee to check what payments on account are held on SAFE.

When you amend the SA return, the revised charges are notified directly onto the customer's SA record. You need to transfer any payments on account held in SAFE back to customer's SA record before you make any amendments to the SA return and issue the final or partial closure notice. You need to do this so that you can include an accurate figure, in the final or partial closure notice, of the additional tax resulting from the amendment that the customer needs to pay by the statutory due date. This avoids the SA system issuing statements for the revised charges which do not take into account the payment on account already made.

To transfer general payments on account back to SA, you should send a request for Repayments and Reallocations to Government Banking & Payments using the Intelligent Payment Process (IPP) Single Form. On submitting the form you are provided with a unique case ID that can be retained with the customers enquiry records. 

You should also check that the ‘No repayment’ signal is set on the SA record. This signal prevents any payments on account being repaid in error after they have been transferred back to SA from SAFE. It should already have been set when the case was selected for enquiry. If the ‘No repayment’ signal is not set on SA, you need to set it before the payment on account is transferred from SAFE to the SA record, see SAM110125.