If you were to take all the people who missed this week’s deadline for filing self-assessment tax returns you would have a number roughly equivalent to the entire population of Leeds!
The almost 750,000 individuals who failed to return their paperwork on time would also be enough to fill Wembley Stadium around eight times over and would outnumber the membership of any single political party in Britain.
Officials at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) confirmed that almost 10.7 million taxpayers had submitted their self-assessment forms before the deadline of midnight on Wednesday (31 January).
Although of these around 30,000 left it incredibly late in the day, having filed the return in the final hour.
The tax authority confirmed yesterday that despite a final flurry of submissions, there were still 745,500 returns yet to be returned. These people now risk a penalty.
Whether a fine will indeed be imposed will likely depend on a person’s individual circumstances. If there was a legitimate reason for missing the deadline – such as an urgent hospital visit – then any penalty is likely to be waived, providing the person returns the form as soon as possible.
Angela MacDonald, the department’s director general for customer services, said: “Please submit your return now to avoid further penalties. We really don’t want penalties, we just want tax returns.”
In total, the number of people who failed to meet this year’s deadline was down on the 840,000 who did not get the return back on time last year.
This might be seen as something of a vindication of HMRC’s ‘farmyard ducks’ campaign, which used pictures of the birds alongside a slogan which warned that an incomplete form would “peck” away at taxpayers.
While the series of online and billboard ads was mocked by some news outlets when unveiled during the period between Christmas and New Year, it was argued that the unusual sight of a man in a bathtub being stared down by a duck generated more interest in the tax authority’s message than slightly more staid reminders in previous years.