Further to guidance issued on 10 October 2019, we would like to update members on annual allowance statements.
We issued annual allowance statements through our automation process, meeting the legislative deadline of 6 October 2019. However, we have been unable to issue some on-demand statements within three months.
We are seeing an increase in requests from members who need to make an assessment due to the ‘tapered’ annual allowance legislation or who are asking for statements for earlier tax years.
We aim to recover as quickly as possible and have significantly increased our staffing levels and are continuing to do so. By 20 November 2019, we expect to be issuing these statements within three months of receipt.
This is slightly later than we had anticipated due to a continuing increase in requests.
Further guidance for members:
- 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 a member’s record is not updated with service and pay details to 31 March 2019 or because of issues with this data. The legislative deadline for these on demand requests is three months of us receiving the pay details or the corrected data.
- The annual allowance team is currently administering on demand requests for the relevant tax year 2018/19, which also includes information on the three carry forward tax years; 2017/18, 2016/17 and 2015/16, and currently we are finding it difficult to respond to requests to provide earlier tax year statements.
- 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.