UK Expat Pension Parity and Taxation Matters

Well March 2010 is here but to date there has been no announcement from the ECHR on the decision about pension parity for UK expats living outside the EEC. You can keep up to date with news as it breaks here but you might also want to check out the breaking news at the pension parity web site.

Whilst on the subject of finances, what about company pensions that are subject to UK tax. Well let me share my personal experience on this one. I get two pensions, my main one from the police and a small one from Teachers pensions. Both are dealt with at different tax offices. One in Swansea(teachers) one in Nottingham(police). Well since the middle of February I have received no less than 6 different notices of coding for the two pensions. I got a £50 rebate for overpayment of tax on my teachers pension and a demand for £70 underpayment on my police pension drop through the letter box on the same day. Both dated in January and posted in Germany!

Now since I only have income from the sources mentioned and it is fixed then I think its fair to assume that some sort of error has occurred internally at HMRC. So I dug around a bit and found this story which I picked up from the BBC, "Pensioner Tax code problem highlighted" You can read the article for yourself but I would highlight one fact and that is that you only have one month to appeal about errors and the mail via Germany takes longer than that to arrive in Thailand. Hardly cricket in my humble opinion.

So if you have had a flurry of notice of coding lately from HMRC, take a close look at them, chances are they will be OK, maybe!