Guidance

Pension schemes newsletter 127 – February 2021

Published 3 February 2021

Managing pension schemes – practitioners

We mentioned in Pension schemes newsletter 126 the next release for the Managing Pension Schemes service will deliver practitioner registration and authorisation features.

These features will be available in March 2021.

As with scheme administrator registration, practitioners will only get one practitioner ID for each Corporation Tax UTR or National Insurance number. Existing practitioners that are registered on the Pension Schemes Online service will also be able to enrol on the Managing Pension Schemes service and keep their existing practitioner ID.

As scheme administrator you’ll be able to authorise these practitioners to act on your behalf through the service and de-authorise them as practitioners from your schemes. Practitioners will also be able to de-authorise themselves from any schemes they are authorised to.

Practitioners that are not authorised to any pension schemes on the Managing Pension Schemes service and no longer want to act as a practitioner, will be able to de-enrol from the service.

Only practitioners registered on the Managing Pension Schemes service will be able to report for schemes that are on that service. They’ll be able to submit Accounting for Tax returns for pension schemes that they are authorised to and view the financial information for these schemes.

We will give you more information on these features in a future newsletter.

For any practitioners who have already been authorised to pension schemes on the Managing Pension Schemes service, through the form APSS150, we will complete the authorisation on the service. But practitioners will need to sign in to the service first. We will give more details on this process in a later newsletter.

Relief at source

Notification of residency status report for 2021 to 2022

You should have received your January 2021 notification of residency status reports.

As we explained in Pension schemes newsletter 126 you had 6 days (144 hours starting from when we made the report available to you) to download your file. You should have received an email and a reminder when your file was available for you to download.

If you cannot open your report because the file is corrupt or did not download your report in time and need the report to be re-presented you should email us at: Support.SDES@hmrc.gov.uk.

If you did not receive your report by the end of January 2021 and you submitted your annual return of information for the previous tax year, or have questions about the data within your report, you should put ‘Relief at source – January 2021 residency report’ in the subject line of your email and send to: reliefatsource.administration@hmrc.gov.uk.

If you did not receive a notification of residency status report

If you did not receive a residency report in January 2021, you can check your members’ residency status for relief at source. 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.

Gibraltar qualifying recognised overseas pension schemes (QROPS)

In Pension schemes newsletter 119 we explained that the Pensions Tax Manual (PTM102300) states that transfers to an European Economic Area (EEA) state are not subject to the overseas transfers charge.

Gibraltar was not an EEA state but was treated as one by virtue of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. As such Gibraltar was not subject to the overseas transfers charge.

Following the end of the transition period, new regulations have been made and laid – The Pension Schemes (Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes)(Gibraltar) (Exclusion of Overseas Transfer Charge) Regulations 2021.

This means that recognised transfers, or onward transfers, to a QROPS established in Gibraltar are treated in the same way as they were before the UK left the EU.

Pension flexibility statistics

The quarterly release of official statistics on flexible payments from pensions for the period 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2020 has now been published.

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

From 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2020 we processed:

• P55 = 4,663 forms
• P53Z = 2,515 forms
• P50Z = 841 forms

Total value repaid: £25,766,055

Figures for the period 1 January 2021 to 31 March 2021 will be published in April 2021.