Spousal VISA refused proving income on a self employed basis

[cellio9]

Hello,

I have two questions, and I'd be grateful for any help anyone can offer.

1) Self-employed applicants are required to submit financial information for the last full financial year. We are submitting all information including the tax return and SA302 for 2013-14, but we've only just finished compiling information for our accountant from the 2014-15 year, so we haven't submitted the tax return for that year yet. Will UKVI accept 2013-14 as the 'last full financial year', or do we have to put a mega-rush through to submit the tax return and obtain the SA302 for 2014-15?

2) I'm applying for the second 2.5-year portion of my spouse visa. My current visa expires on 3 July 2015 and my premium appointment is booked for 3 June 2015. Does anyone know if my appointment is too early? Is it allowed to be more than 28 days before expiry?

Many thanks.

[CR001]

Please follow the forum rules regarding Multiple Posting (click)

As soon as a member is online who can advise on your first question, they will post a reply. If you are the applicant for the extension, it might if you can say whether you work or not as joint income can be considered for FLR(M) extension applications.

On your second question, you should be fine to submit your extension application as you have booked and it should not cause an issue with a shortfall to meet the full 5 years residence requirement.

[cellio9]

Thank you for your reply.
Both of us work, and we are using joint income as the basis for our assessment.

[CR001]

Who is the self employed spouse, it is difficult to make out from your post? Are either spouse a salaried employee with a company?

[cellio9]

We are both self-employed.

[CR001]

Ahhh, ok, makes sense now. I am not overly familiar with self employed income for extensions, hopefully someone will respond to you soon.

[cellio9]

OK, thanks for your help anyway.

[PariJ]

For 1) i will defer this to members who have applied in this category( ie self employed -solde trader ,i assume) but as per Appendix FM 9.3.3 (stated below), SA302 should cover April 14-April 15.You still have time to complete your assesment and ask your accountant to post the attested copy of Sa302 as it will take 2-3 weeks to get the orginals from HMRC .

My advise is stick to the guidelines and provide proper supporting documentations.My first application for my spouse's entry clearance was rejected on grounds that financial documents (Category F) not covering relevant financial year.I re submitted the application on May 18th and submitted Sa302 for April 15 as part of the documentation.Hope this helps.

"The evidence submitted must cover the relevant financial year(s) most recently ended. A self-assessment tax return may include provisional figures, where the return explains why this is so and how the figures were arrived at, and in which case a covering letter explaining this and how any provisional figures tie in with other material submitted, e.g. audited or unaudited accounts, may be helpful. This means that a sponsor wishing to rely on earnings from self-employment as a sole trader, as a partner or in a franchise will need to arrange to file their self assessment tax return to HMRC on a timescale geared to meeting this requirement of the Immigration Rules rather than the deadline set for UK tax purposes"

[cellio9]

Hello, thanks very much for this very helpful reply.

[cellio9]

Just had my appointment, which was a success! However, until the last minute I was very worried about the SA302's, and it turns out I was right to be. We did not have the SA302 printed by HMRC for the 2014-15 tax year; we only had the print-out from the last page of our submitted tax return. (The tax year finished 8 weeks ago and some of our payments relating to that year had only just come in, so we couldn't file the return any earlier... nightmare!) However, luckily we did have HMRC's SA302's for the 2013-14 tax year, and because we had submitted complete financial information for both 2014-15 and 2013-14 they decided to use the 2013-14 figures for our application. We are lucky, because they used their discretion to use the 2013-14 year. We're also lucky that we had HMRC's printed SA302 for 2013-14; otherwise, we probably wouldn't have been granted the visa. So, for future applicants, make sure you request your SA302's from HMRC 3 weeks before your appointment or before you send your postal application. They can be requested using the phone number found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisat ... ndividuals (You can be on hold for a while, my record was 60 minutes...) If you tell them you're in a hurry they will expedite the posting, so hopefully it doesn't take the full 3 weeks to arrive.