Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS)
Self employed individuals can start to make a claim for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) grant from 13 May. The grant will allow you to claim up to 80% of your profits up to a maximum of £2.5k per month.
To qualify for the grant, you must meet the following criteria:
You must have submitted a 2018-19 tax return
The majority of your income must have come from your self employment
You must have traded throughout 2019-20 and continue to trade
Your self employed profits must be below £50k
Your business must have been adversely affected by coronavirus.
HMRC have started sending out correspondence by mail, text or email to all those they believe may qualify. You can see if you will qualify by using HMRC's eligibility checker:
www.tax.service.gov.uk/self-employment-support/enter-unique-taxpayer-reference
If you believe you do qualify but HMRC's checking tool states that you do not, please let me know - the checker isn't 100% reliable.
HMRC are going to stagger the dates that taxpayers are able to make claims (from 13 May to 18 May) to avoid overloading their system. The eligibility checker will tell you from which date you can apply.
Unfortunately the only way to claim the grant will be through the taxpayer’s own HMRC government gateway account. Accountants are not able to make claims on behalf of their clients.
As most taxpayers do not have a government gateway account, HMRC have simplified the registration process.
To set up a government gateway account go to:
www.gov.uk/personal-tax-account/sign-in/prove-identity
and click on 'Create an account'.
You will be asked to enter your UTR and NI number; you will be provided with a user ID and you will be asked to create a password. Then you will just need to provide a form of ID (driving licence/ passport) to confirm your identity.
Once you have your government gateway login details and you have arrived at the date that the eligibility checker has told you that you can apply, you will be able to make your claim.
Making the claim is a straight forward process. You just need to enter your login details, then confirm that you traded in 2019/20, you are still trading, your business has been affected by coronavirus and enter your bank account details.
There is no need to calculate any figures as HMRC will do all of this for you.
Once you have done all of the above, HMRC will provide you with calculations which you should print/ screen print for your records.
The grant will be paid into your bank account within 6 days.