Guidance

Pension schemes newsletter 116 – January 2020

Published 28 January 2020

1. Pension flexibility statistics

The quarterly release of official statistics on flexible payments from pensions for the period 1 October 2019 to 31 December 2019 will be published shortly.

HMRC can now give more information on the number of tax repayment claim forms processed for pension flexibility payments.

From 1 October 2019 to 31 December 2019 we processed:

• P55 = 5,759 forms
• P53Z = 3,422 forms
• P50Z = 1,154 forms

Total value repaid: £32,191,054

Figures for the period 1 January 2020 to 31 March 2020 will be published in April 2020.

2. Pension Schemes Online service

a. Problems accessing the Pension Schemes Online service

We know that some scheme administrators have been experiencing problems when trying to access or use the Pension Schemes Online service. We’re working to fix this and are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

If you receive an error message try deleting your cookies, cache and history. Once you’ve done this, log back into your business tax account again but not through a bookmarked link or a link in your ‘favourites’.

If you still receive error messages and are concerned about pension scheme reporting, you should email pensions.businessdelivery@hmrc.gov.uk and put ‘Pension scheme reporting’ in the subject line of your email.

b. Accounting for tax (AFT) return

We want to remind pension scheme administrators amending AFT returns that the Pension Schemes Online service only allows amendments where you’re changing a monetary amount on the return. You should keep your own records of any subsequent amendments needed to details, other than to monetary amounts on the return.

3. Managing Pension Schemes service

a. Managing Pension Schemes service newsletter

In mid-January we published the Managing Pension Schemes service newsletter – January 2020 with articles on:

• Phase 2 timeline
• how you can help us
• scheme administrator enrolment
• giving access to the service to business tax account administrators and assistants
• migration of pension schemes to the Managing Pension Schemes Service
• pension scheme reporting
• lifetime allowance
• decommissioning the Pension Schemes Online service
• appendix 1 – table of updates to the Managing Pension Schemes Service

b. User research

We’re still looking for feedback to help improve the Managing Pension Schemes service. If you’re interested in taking part in research and giving us feedback about pension scheme reporting, you can join the Managing Pension Schemes user panel.

As a member of the panel, you’ll only be contacted about the Managing Pension Schemes service.

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

You should have now received your January 2020 notification of residency status reports.

As we explained in Pension Schemes Newsletter 115, you have 6 days (144 hours starting from when we made the report available to you) to download your file. If you do not download your report in time and it is no longer available to you, you can contact Secure Data Exchange Service (SDES) support at support.sdes@hmrc.gov.uk and ask for the report to be re-presented. The same time limits will apply. You should have received an email and a reminder when your file was available for you to download. You can also log in to the (SDES) to check if your report is available. We’ll contact all pension scheme administrators of relief at source schemes who have not downloaded their report, to remind them to do this.

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

Notification of residency status report for 2020 to 2021 – corrected National Insurance (NI) numbers

We identified an error with a small percentage of the corrected NI numbers that we provided in last year’s residency status reports. Some were incorrect. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

We’re looking into why this happened and we will make sure that we fix this for next year. We decided to remove corrected NI numbers from this year’s report and we’ve written to scheme administrators.

5. Trust Registration Service

As you may be aware, HM Treasury laid the regulations for the EU 5th Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Finance Directive (5MLD) on 20 December 2019 and the regulations did not include proposed changes to the trust register.

HMRC and HM Treasury published a consultation on the expansion of the existing Trust Registration Service as part of 5MLD on 24 January 2020. This includes details of the proposed scope of the register and the process by which data will be shared. We know that scheme administrators may be concerned about the possibility of having to register on the Trust Registration Service and we welcome views and evidence on the proposals in the consultation. You can find details about how to respond in the consultation document.

If you want to respond to this consultation, you should submit your responses by 21 February 2020. In the meantime, you should follow the current registration guidance regarding taxable activity and not register any other pension scheme on the Trust Registration Service.

6. Change to the scheduled publication of the recognised overseas pension scheme (ROPS) notification list.

There will be a slight delay to publication of the next updates to the ROPS notifications list. Instead of updating the list on 3 February 2020, we will update the list at 9am on Wednesday 5 February 2020.