Yep, 15 minutes, give or take.
January 31, 2010, is the deadline for filing UK taxes for fiscal year 2008-09, and I repeated the self-assessment process that I first mentioned here. This time, I literally typed in three different amounts provided to me on the British equivalent of W-2 form (called P60) and one other form (called P11D), after answering a series of binary questions regarding my sources of income and eligible deductions; to do all that I needed to click through about two dozen different screens at the HMRC website, but all of my personal information was already there, I only had to additionally re-enter my banking account attributes for the purposes of direct deposit. It all took 15 minutes, if that.
I actually ended up owing Her Majesty’s government a small amount of money, which was very easily paid through my UK bank online service. My tax account already reflects zero balance on the website.
Curiously enough, this is not the last time I will have to report taxes in the UK. Their fiscal year inexplicably runs from April 7th of one year through April 6th of the next. As I was on the UK payroll through early August of 2009, I earned about four months of salary in the fiscal year 2009-10. The tax return filing deadline for that will be January 31, 2011. Only after that I’ll no longer have any obligations to HM Revenue & Customs.