Guidance

Pension schemes newsletter 133 — September 2021

Published 30 September 2021

1. Relief at source — annual return of information and notification of residency status reports

If you need to submit an annual return of information for 2020 to 2021 and you have not already done so, it’s important that you successfully submit this as soon as possible. Without this we’ll be unable to give you a notification of residency status report in January 2022.

You can find more information about the notification of residency status reports in our check a pension scheme member’s residency status for relief at source guidance on GOV.UK.

2. Pension scheme migration

In Managing pension schemes newsletter – August 2021 we provided an update on the migration of pension schemes from the Pension schemes online service to the Managing pension schemes service.

We explained from the 19 October 2021, scheme administrators will be able to view a list of pension schemes they need to migrate on to the Managing pension schemes service.

Due to the level of development and testing that is required, we’ve decided to delay the delivery of this feature onto the service by a few weeks.

We appreciate that this delay will be disappointing but we are keen to ensure that we get this right for our customers.

We’ll instead release this feature in November 2021.

We’ll provide further information and guidance in our newsletter at the end of October 2021.

3. Reporting multiple small pots payments through Real Time Information (RTI)

In Pension schemes newsletter 94 we explained that we’re aware that some pension scheme administrators have problems when reporting multiple small pots payments.

We gave a further update in Pension schemes newsletter 100 and updated the guidance in CWG2: further guide to PAYE and National Insurance contributions.

HMRC have continued to run the recovery scans to identify cases that have been merged in error and update records to reflect the correct payment details.

We’ve recently implemented a fix aimed at preventing the merging of records in such cases. Implementation of the fix has required a review of the current guidance in CWG2: further guide to PAYE and National Insurance contributions.

When reporting these types of payments, you should now also enter a start date and enter the amount of the lump sum payment in the ‘annual amount of occupational pension’ field for each lump sum being reported. Part 2.2.5 of CWG2: Further guide to PAYE and National Insurance contributions has been updated to reflect this.

4. HMRC Pensions Tax Manual

We are aware that the signposting of the updates to the HMRC Pensions Tax Manual have not been showing correctly.

This has now been fixed and all updates back to March 2021 are now available to view.