Guidance

Pension schemes newsletter 115 – November 2019

Published 26 November 2019

1. Lifetime allowance and the 2019 to 2020 event report

We’ve received some questions from scheme administrators about how to report details for 2019 to 2020 of those scheme members who have relied on more recent lifetime allowance protections.

You should email us at pensions.businessdelivery@hmrc.gov.uk if you need to report details of your members who have relied on:

• individual protection 2014 (applied for using the digital service)
• fixed protection 2016
• individual protection 2016

You should put ‘Lifetime Allowance 2019 to 2020 Event Report’ in the subject line of your email. We’ll then contact you to confirm how to provide this information.

2. Managing Pension Schemes service - giving access to Government Gateway administrators and assistants

Once you’ve enrolled for the Manage and Register Pension Schemes service, you can add administrators and assistants. To do this you should assign the service through your Government Gateway account to any of your other Government Gateway administrators or assistants, using the same scheme administrator ID. But if you do, make sure you do this before they log in to use the Manage and Register Pension Schemes service.

Assigning the service to your administrators before they log in will help prevent the service treating them as a new scheme administrator and asking them again for the enrollment information that you’ve already completed. If they complete a second enrollment under the same scheme administrator ID, this will cause errors on HMRC systems and no user will be able to access the service under this scheme administrator ID.

To assign the Manage and Register Pension Schemes service through your Government Gateway account, should select Pensions Online Digital Service HMRC-PODS-ORG from the assign services page.

3. Managing Pension Schemes service – pension practitioner IDs

Like scheme administrators, practitioners will only be able to use one practitioner ID for each Corporation Tax UTR or National Insurance number once we migrate to the Managing Pension Schemes service.

If you’re a pension scheme practitioner with one Corporation Tax UTR but multiple scheme practitioner IDs, you’ll also need to move your schemes under one practitioner ID on the Pension Schemes Online service ahead of pension scheme migration to the Managing Pension Schemes service.

To help you with this we can check:

• your scheme practitioner IDs
• the schemes for which you are the practitioner

You must send us a separate request for each of these and provide the following information.

For a list of your scheme practitioner IDs you must provide:

• your scheme practitioner name
• your scheme practitioner address, including postcode
• your contact telephone number and email address

You should email this information to pensions.businessdelivery@hmrc.gov.uk and put ‘List of my scheme practitioner IDs’ in the subject line of your email.

For a list of registered pension schemes attached to your scheme practitioner ID you must provide:

• your scheme practitioner name
• your scheme practitioner ID
• your contact telephone number and email address

You should email this information to pensions.businessdelivery@hmrc.gov.uk and put ‘List of my registered pension schemes’ in the subject line of your email.

We’ll validate the information you provide and may ask you for more information before we provide any scheme or scheme practitioner details.

You should use the information to check your records and tell us of any scheme practitioner IDs or schemes that you no longer need.

Scheme practitioners operating with more than one Corporation Tax UTR can have a scheme practitioner ID for each Corporation Tax UTR held.

Once you have a list of your schemes and scheme practitioner IDs and you’ve decided which scheme practitioner ID you want to keep, you can contact us if you need help with moving your schemes under your chosen scheme practitioner ID. Email us at pensions.businessdelivery@hmrc.gov.uk and put ‘Help with scheme practitioner IDs’ in the subject line of your email.

4. Relief at Source - notification of residency status report for 2020 to 2021

As we explained in Pension Schemes Newsletter 113 if you’re the scheme administrators of a relief at source pension scheme, you had to successfully submit your annual return of information for 2018 to 2019 by 30 September 2019 to ensure that we would provide your notification of residency status report in January 2020.

The deadline has now passed, so we will not be able to provide you with a residency report for January 2020 if you haven’t submitted your annual return of information. However it’s still important that you successfully submit your 2018 to 2019 return as soon as possible, otherwise we may stop your subsequent interim repayments.

a. Receiving your notification of residency status report

In January 2020, we’ll tell you the residency tax status of your scheme members, so that you can apply the correct rate of relief at source to your scheme members in the tax year 2020 to 2021.

From mid-January 2020 you’ll be able to download your notification of residency status report from the Secure Data Exchange Service (SDES) and your report will be based on data from your 2018 to 2019 annual return of information. We’ll send you an email when we start to release the notification of residency status reports, so if you want to be added to our mailing list please email reliefatsource.administration@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk and put ‘Relief at source – mailing list’ in the subject line of your email.

You’ll also receive an email through SDES when your file is available for you to download. You’ll have 6 days to download this (144 hours) starting from when we make the file available to you.

You should check that your email address is up to date on SDES and if not you should update this to avoid delay in accessing your report. If you’re expecting an email from us but do not think you’ve received one, check your junk folder in your email account.

You should email us at Support.SDES@hmrc.gov.uk if you:

• cannot open your report because the file is corrupt
• do not download your report in time

You should email us at reliefatsource.administration@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk and put ‘Relief at source – January 2020 residency report’ in the subject line of your email if you:

• do not receive your report by the end of January 2020 and you submitted your annual return of information for the previous tax year
• have questions about the data contained within your report

b. If you do not receive a notification of residency status report

If you do not receive a residency report in January 2020, you can check your members’ residency status for relief at source by using our look up service. You can check the residency tax status for single or multiple members or default to the UK basic rate for your members.

If you do not have a residency status for a member by the time you claim relief at source on their first contribution in a tax year, you must treat them as having a ‘rest of UK’ residency status. You must not apply a tax rate based on the member’s address.

Once you’ve used a residency status to claim relief at source for a member, you must use this for the whole of the tax year.

5. Annual allowance – members declaring their annual allowance charge on their Self Assessment tax return

We know that scheme members are forgetting to declare details of their annual allowance charge on their their Self Assessment returns. We’d ask scheme administrators to remind those members who have exceeded their annual allowance for 2018 to 2019 and who do not have sufficient unused annual allowance to carry forward to cover the excess, that they must declare this on their Self Assessment tax return, even if your scheme is paying the tax charge.

The Pension savings - tax charges (Self Assessment helpsheet HS345) has specific information on declaring the annual allowance charge on Self Assessment returns.

In Pension Schemes Newsletter 114 we explained that we’ve created a new guide paying and declaring the annual allowance charge. Thank you to those of you who commented on this guide. We’ve made some small changes in response to feedback we received.

Your members can also find information and guidance about annual allowance and carrying forward unused annual allowance on GOV.UK and they can use our calculator to check whether they need to declare and pay an annual allowance tax charge.