Tax | Pensions Talk

Archive for the ‘Tax’ Category

Early retirement pension rights and TUPE – practical problems after Procter & Gamble

Thursday, 7 February 2013

What early retirement pension benefits does an employer need to provide when taking on employees on a business transfer? And how should the employer provide them?

Last year the High Court confirmed that enhanced early retirement rights under occupational pension schemes can transfer with the member on a TUPE transfer (Procter & Gamble v SCA). In July, Mervyn Parry posted about some of the questions left unanswered by this case (Early retirement rights and TUPE – where next?). These unanswered questions are now turning into real lurking obstacles which employers are finding difficult to navigate. Here are a couple of examples we’ve seen recently. (more…)

Keeping fixed protection for pension benefits – is this within your control?

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Fixed protection for an individual’s lifetime allowance for tax-favoured pension benefits is a valuable thing. If you registered for fixed protection before 6 April 2012 you can keep a lifetime allowance of £1.8 million or, if greater, the standard lifetime allowance. But you lose fixed protection if you go into a new pension arrangement. You might have thought that telling your employer about your special tax status, and asking them not to put you into a pension scheme would be enough to make sure you kept your fixed protection. However I am beginning to see cases where employees are being accidentally enrolled despite asking not to be. Auto-enrolment will only add to the problem.

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The work/pension balance: issues with flexible retirement

Thursday, 14 June 2012

One issue which regularly comes up in meetings with both our employer and trustee clients is flexible retirement – should employees be allowed to take their pension while they continue to work in the group and earn further pension benefits? This gives rise to a lot of discussion but not that many clients have taken action. Recent employment law developments involving the removal of the default retirement age have brought this more sharply into focus. (more…)

Scheme pays: act now to avoid complaints later?

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

It sounded like a simple enough idea in principle: the new, lower, annual allowance for pension saving could lead to hefty tax charges for some members – substantially in excess of their actual income for the year – relating to increases in pension benefits which won’t translate into cash in hand for years or possibly decades to come. Some members might not be able to pay that tax bill, so the neat solution devised by the Treasury was to allow members to require their pension scheme to meet the annual allowance tax charge instead of paying it personally, with a corresponding deduction from pension – the facility known as ‘scheme pays’. (more…)

Burning issues on the horizon for pension scheme trustees and pensions managers

Thursday, 18 August 2011

Pension scheme trustees and pensions managers often ask us about the burning legal issues on the horizon that will need to be dealt with in the next quarter. Auto-enrolment, pensions tax, flexible drawdown and identifying your statutory employers seem to be the favourites. (more…)