We would like to clarify our current position in regards to providing annual allowance pension savings statements.
Recently we have issued annual allowance statements through our automation process, meeting the legislative deadline of 6 October 2019.
The remit for annual allowance is to provide statements to our members, only if they exceed the ‘standard’ annual allowance; currently £40,000.
We are unable provide a statement if member records have not been updated with 2018/19 pay details or because of data issues. The legislative deadline for these is three months of us receiving the pay details or the correct data.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) guidance to members who have not yet received a statement is to estimate their liability to an annual allowance charge based on available information. They cite a possible source of information as an annual benefit statement.
More information is available on the GOV.UK website.
On Demand statements
For members who have requested an annual allowance statement on demand, we have been unable to fulfill our obligation to issue these within three months.
We are seeing an increasing number of requests from members who need to make an assessment due to the ‘tapered’ annual allowance legislation and because of this our workload has significantly increased. We are currently administering requests received from early June 2019.
We aim to recover as quickly as possible and to do this we have significantly increased our staffing levels. By 31 October 2019, we expect to be back to providing these statements within 3 months of receipt. However this could be impacted if the number of on demand requests continues to increase.
In addition to the tapered legislation, we have also received a significant increase of other annual allowance requests and as such, we wish to give clarification on:
- Requests for earlier tax year statements
- Breakdown of calculations
Requests for earlier tax year statements
The annual allowance team is currently administering for the relevant tax year 2018/19 and cannot fulfil general requests to provide earlier tax year statements.
Breakdown of calculations
We are receiving an increased number of requests for breakdowns of annual allowance calculations. We are unable to provide breakdowns of calculations routinely, but we will look at our calculations again if information has been provided to suggest that an error has occurred or incorrect data has been used.
In order to help you with your annual allowance calculations, visit our website.
We have information available on how the opening and closing values are calculated for annual allowance purposes:
Process for calculating the annual allowance 2007 (PDF: 205KB)
Thank you for your co-operation at this time.