外国人暮らしのQ＆A「市税事務所から住民税の納入通知書が届いたが、給料から払っていたのになぜか？」

Q:

I live in Nagoya City. The municipal tax office sent me a notice requesting payment of resident tax. I was working at a company until October last year, and I'm currently looking for a new job. But when I was working, I was paying resident tax out of my monthly salary, so why am I being asked to pay again?

A:

People working and receiving a salary from a company have income tax (shotokuzei / 所得税) and resident tax (jūminzei / 住民税, the collective term for prefectural resident tax and municipal resident tax) deducted from their salary. With income tax, each time you receive your salary, etc., the tax is calculated and deducted from the amount you are to receive. Resident tax, on the other hand, is calculated from your total amount of income for the previous year, and the total amount of resident tax is divided into equal instalments to be paid during the current fiscal year.

In other words, resident tax is a tax paid in the current year on one's income for the previous year, so you are actually paying it a year later. The resident tax you are currently being asked to pay is actually a tax applied to your income for the year 2021, and which you were to pay during fiscal 2022.

For a person whose earnings are from a salary, you would be paying resident tax over 12 months, from June 2022 through May 2023.

In your case, with the resident tax applied to you in 2022, you would have begun paying from your salary for June 2022, and continued paying through to October, when you left your employer. Because you were no longer receiving a salary after that, you had only paid your residence tax for 5 months, and the 7 instalments that would have been deducted from your salary month by month from November onwards remained unpaid.

If you leave a company, you are then required to pay the remaining resident tax yourself. When paying resident tax directly yourself, you are required to pay in 4 instalments which are due at the end of June, August, October, and January of the following year. It would seem that you were required to pay your remaining unpaid resident tax by the last deadline, the end of January, hence the payment request.

The remaining amount may be quite large, as it will be the combined amount that you would have been paying as 7 monthly instalments if you had still been working. If it looks like it will be difficult to pay the full amount at once, please consult the municipal tax office concerned.

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