It does sound like you should have been employed but that is really their problem as they should have been deducting PAYE and paying employers NI. You need to submit a self assessment tax return with your business expenses on it and see how things turn out. The worst that can happen is that you won't be allowed any expenses and will have to pay the tax on the full amount you earned.

Have a look at the HMRC webiste but you should be able to claim for the business proportion of your petrol, car lease, servicing, tax, tyres etc. You'll have to include the amount you were paid as mileage reimbursement as income though. You'll also be able to claim a proportion of the running costs of your home and the business element of your mobile. Don't try to claim for anything you can't justify or haven't got receipts for though.

You'll have to put your income pre August on the return as well as your JSA but you'll get the full years allowance to offset against your net income (ie. earned and net profit) and you'll ahve already paid teh tax on the employed bit.

Thanks for that. You bring up a very good point about whether I was self employed or not. Basically the company decided in august 2008 to lay us all off ( was only 2 staff anyway) but actually in reality just made me register as self employed and paid me a retainer equivalent to my old wage. They closed the office and I worked from an office in my own home but all my work still came through them and the only real difference I could see was that I had to set money aside every month to pay my own tax bill (which I'm trying to sort out now) and pay my own NI every 3 months.

I had to keep mileage records as I claimed from them every month but they charged me for the car lease so it basically pretty much just cancelled out my mileage claim every month.

They've actually had to sell the company on now as it was going belly up anyway - hence the JSA from feb onwards.

Its all very confusing and I'm just worried that they have been doing something dodgy and now I'll get stung with a huge tax bill!

Have a look at the HMRC website - it really is quite good.

Generally speaking you can claim tax relief for any expenses directly associated with your self employment. It is up to you to be able to justify that they wholly relate to work so to claim home expenses you really need a separate room set up as an office and then you should be able to pro rata the costs based on square footage or some other similar basis. car costs etc are OK but you need to be able to demonstrate the split between business and private - I assume you kept some sort of mileage record ?

You'll have to include your JSA as well as that is taxable I think (check on HMRC website). I'm surprised you're claiming it though as most self employed people give their business more than 7 months before giving up. If you're only business was provided by your old employer then you might get questions from the tax man as to whether you were really self employed or not - usually you'd need a number of contracts/customers.

Hi, hope this is posted in the right place! I was registered as self employed from August 2008 until Feb 2009 so I now need to complete a self assessment. During this period I was paid a retainer of £2,900 per month by the company that I had previously worked for. I finished in feb and was registered as unemployed and claiming JSA since then until a few weeks ago.

Is there any easy way of working out what my tax bill is likely to be around? I think I can deduct for working from home, electric bills, mobile, heating bill, car lease payments and fuel etc which will reduce the bill a bit. Is this correct?

Thanks