edit: so it's not that different, just a different method of doing so. Good to know.
Even this isn't needed in most cases; things are either done employer side (paid from pre-tax income, like pensions) or directly by the government (basic rate tax is semi-automatically added to charitable donations, so only higher rate taxpayers need to declare it, and they all fill in a short return anyway).
Guess, I could claim that £6 per week for Covid work from home stuff. Wish you could claim the cost of repairing your bike, or public transport costs.
Another example of how the system works - if you are working two jobs, both as a regular employee, HRMC will instruct your employer as to what your tax deduction should be for that paycheck to make sure that things are balanced. For <some large number>% of people, this will be correct, and if it's not, it will rectify itself over 2 or 3 pay periods. If that's _still_ not enough, a phone call to HMRC (usually taking less than 10 minuts for the two times in a decade I've had to do it) will resolve the issue in your next check.
(I forget the exact percentage.)
You can either:
* Gift that remaining amount to HMRC by doing nothing (it will not go to the charity)
* Claim it back (I don't know any other way to do this other than filing a self assessment)
If the donor donates that amount as well and we loop infinitely, the final amount received by the charity would be exactly 1.5625x the originally-donated amount (assuming that the HMRC allows arbitrary small fractions of a penny to be claimed).
Explanation: if you donate an amount x, the final amount would be the infinite series x + sigma(0.25*0.2^(k-1) + 0.2^k, k=1, k=inf), which is the sum of two separate geometric series, so for each one, we can use the formula a/(1-r), where 'a' is the first term (0.25 for the first series, 0.2 for the second) and 'r' is the ratio between each term (0.2 in both cases).
Half goes to the charity, and half to the donor.
Someone on PAYE will have most of the deductibles handled by their employer (pension, any salary sacrifice schemes etc).
Oddly, buy-to-let landlords do retain this deductible, though HMRC have fiddled around with how this works over recent times[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_so...
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restricting-finan...
That simply isn't true. An income of £80,000 puts you in the top 4% of adult earners. A salary of £100,000 is probably in the top 2 or 3%.
This was discussed extensively at the last election when Labout proposed a new tax rate for people earning over £125k https://election2019.ifs.org.uk/article/labour-s-proposed-in...
It can be more tax efficient to file tax paperwork, but I don't want to do paperwork, so I just had an umbrella employ me when somebody insisted on hiring me as a "contractor" and the umbrella handled the paperwork for which of course they keep a fee. As far as the government is concerned I just had two PAYE employers, the umbrella and my "real" job.
Having multiple employers also does not require filing taxes. One of the employers gets given a zero tax code and they tax all your pay at full rate, the other one gets a normal tax code which reflects your personal allowance and other considerations. My tax code was oscillating all over the place - but that's not a problem it's all automated.
If you love paperwork you can choose to do all the paperwork. Or if you love money and don't hate paperwork maybe you can save a few hundred quid by filing and I hope it makes you happy. I hate paperwork, and I have plenty of money. So, no, despite earning a lot of money and having worked as a contractor I preferred to stick with PAYE.
The HMRC will take a fair cut of my gross income, which is fine, and then leave me alone whereas an accountant earns money by bothering me with more paperwork.
How do you know it's fair?
Accountants don’t bother you - once a year they ask you to sign your accounts.
I'm guessing you're conflating professionals with contractors, as most high earning professionals I know do not need an accountant to file their taxes, as it's all just done on a self assessment, which is extremely straight forward, and there's little opportunity to game that system effectively.
Meanwhile contractors operating through Ltd entities (now may be hamstrung somewhat with IR35) absolutely should be leveraging an accountant to take advantage of the various ways to reduce their taxable earnings.
Yes you don't need an accountant (and I didn't say that you did) but if you want one instead of doing it yourself they just about £100 rather than I don't know how many thousand that would cost you in the US.