Gift Aid Update Email FAQs

By joining the Gift Aid scheme, you authorised Oxfam Activities Limited – Oxfam’s trading company – to sell goods on your behalf and turn them into cash which you can gift to Oxfam. This means that if you are a UK taxpayer, for every £1 your items make, Oxfam will receive a further 25p from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) via a government Gift Aid scheme.

HMRC states that in order for us to treat the money raised through the sale of your goods as a donation, Oxfam must contact you first to:

• tell you how much money we’ve raised from the sale of your goods
• tell you how much of your tax we intend to claim as Gift Aid
• ask if you’re happy to treat this money as a donation and for Oxfam to claim the Gift Aid.

Please contact us if you want to cancel or amend this declaration, if you no longer pay sufficient UK Income Tax and / or Capital Gains Tax to cover the amount reclaimed, or if your address changes. We are required to hold your current home address to identify you as a UK taxpayer; if we do not have this, we may be unable to reclaim the tax you have paid on your donations.

You can contact us in the following ways:

• Use the personalised links in your email
• sending an email to: heretohelp@oxfam.org.uk
• or by calling our Supporter Relations team on 0300 200 1300. We’ll be happy to help you.

Please contact us as soon as possible using one of the methods above so that we can cancel your Gift Aid Declaration and not claim the Gift Aid. If you have paid insufficient Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax to cover your donations, you may need to pay the shortfall of tax to HMRC, as it is your responsibility to pay any difference.

In line with HMRC guidance, we are only allowed to claim Gift Aid on proceeds of your donated items 21 days after we have written to you, and it is only at that point they become a ‘donation’ to Oxfam. Therefore, we will claim Gift Aid in the tax year in which we contact you, which may be different from the year in which your items sold.

Please consult relevant HMRC guidance for your personal circumstances. If you are going to inform HMRC of your gifts to charity, including those from these sales and claim any applicable tax relief, please keep this email for your records and to support you in completing your self-assessment tax return. If you do not currently complete a tax return, please contact HMRC for support.

If you have signed up for our Retail Gift Aid scheme more than once, you will be allocated a new donor number for each sign up. These will all remain valid, and your record should be merged on our system to ensure we are informing you of all your sales. This email will use the most recent Donor Number on your account.

Our shops always aim to get the best price possible for every item donated. If your sales seem low, there are a few possible reasons for this:

• We might pass items to another shop (because certain shops specialise in certain types of product). We’ll still track the item to your number, but it just takes a little longer to sell.
• Goods may be stored for sale in a more appropriate season and so you might get another email next year about further sales.
• Some items may simply not have sold yet but might have by the next time your email is sent. It can take up to 12 weeks to sell an item.
• They may have been displayed for some time and not sold, and so have now been taken off sale.
• Your items may have become separated from their tag. We obviously hope that this wouldn’t happen very often, but it is a manual process and if the shop is very busy the tag may get separated.
• There’s a good chance that your donated item will sell in one of our stores. In instances where an item isn’t sold, we work hard to ensure it is either re-purposed or recycled wherever possible.