Your Personal Tax Account is a place where you can easily manage your tax affairs. In your Personal Tax Account (PTA), you can bring together all your information, and easily inform the Revenue if any of your circumstances change.
Launched in December 2015, the PTA allows you to check your tax information online, in one place. It gives you the ability to update your personal details, access forms relating to several taxes and benefits, as well as submit and track the forms online, and more. You can also complete, send and view your personal tax return, claim a tax refund, check your state pension and manage your tax credits to name a few services, with more to be added in the future.
With having lots of personal information in one place, I’m sure security comes to mind. From a blog written by Richard James, Programme Director for the Personal Tax Account, he quotes “We have strong defences in place to stop criminals attacking our systems”, and they also “monitor transactions constantly” to make sure that there isn’t any unusual activity happening.
If you haven’t already, you can create a PTA by visiting https://www.gov.uk/personal-tax-account, and to sign in for the first time, you’ll need a Government Gateway account and your National Insurance number. That is one way to sign in, and you can also sign in with GOV.UK Verify, which according to HMRC, takes about 15 minutes to set up.
As of December 2016, 8 million people had already signed up for a PTA, accessing their information anywhere, on their desktop, smartphone or tablet. Have you signed up yet?
