Confused over needing NI number and allowances

[jrd-games]

My non-related business *completely* died in May last year but I still had a huge tax bill from the previous tax year to pay off, so resorted to selling off a lot of my prized possessions on eBay to soften the blow.

Today, I just got a notification about supplying my National Insurance Number to eBay. 

Have seen conflicting info. One thing was saying I should be paying taxes as the sales did cross the £1700 threshold, but a page on the HMRC site says I don't need to as I was selling my personal possessions below 6k. What to do here?

To be honest, the platform is now absolutely *awful* to use as a private seller so was just thinking of closing my account anyway.

[alfifletch27]

No problem

Sent from my iPhone

[tegeus-cromis]

Not just low, but absurd. Thirty diamond rings or thirty trading cards? It's a completely meaningless metric.

[lucy_farmer]

'Thirty diamond rings or thirty trading cards? It's a completely meaningless metric.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I agree with you there! It's a bit silly.

A financial limit, yes, fine.  After all the whole business is about finance in the first place.

(ebay didn't make up the daft metric though : neither did HMRC. Some bright spark in the OECD thought it up. Which is why the more logical financial limit is a slightly strange £1750. 'ish. This translates to about  2000 EUROS)

[ett1954]

The financial limit is set to €2,000 because the currency used by the highest number of members is the Euro.

The reporting parameters (calendar year) are set because other members use the calendar year as their tax reporting year.

The transaction number level is set to cater for those economies, e.g Costa Rica, Chile and Mexico; that are developing and where monetary value does not equate to that in the more 'developed' countries.  It is envisaged that more Caribbean and South American countries will be joining the organisation.  People have to stop looking at this from just a UK perspective.

For info. the current members of the OECD are:  Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.