Autumn Budget Statement UK 2022

Politics
21

It’s phone only I’m afraid - you need to get put through to that tax treaty technician. You could write but that’ll probably take a year (at least!). You have lodged the DTT form ‘france individuelle’ with them for the state pension?

I’m now very curious about your missing tax code notice - as you don’t have an online account they have to post it - presume they have your France address set as the communications address?.

contact details from the Internet -

Telephone:
0300 200 3300

Outside UK:
+44 135 535 9022

Opening times:

Monday to Friday: 8am to 6pm

Closed on weekends and bank holidays.

Best time to call:

Phone lines are less busy before 10am.

22

My UK state pension for 2023 amounted to 12,000 euros gross, tax to be paid in France.

I’ve looked in my intray and I don’t seem to have received anything from the HMRC and I haven’t lodged a DTT form. I assume I have to download it and send it by ‘snail mail’? Maybe I could email it as a .jpg but doubt if there’s an HMRC email address!

23

Ah - you’ll need to lodge the DTT form, yes download, print out, take it to impot office and have it stamped and signed, you then post it. Keep a scanned copy. You’ll probably need to give an explanation for the timescales.

Plenty of posts about the process on the forum. Give HMRC a few months then ring and request the technician - they’ll see it and you might be able to get it processed.

You’ll see on the form there is a tick box for state pension. You can ask HMRC to calculate the tax refund owed. Hopefully they can do it by amending the tax code back to 12570L but you’ll likely miss the tax year end so maybe not. If you get it in the post quick - maybe, but you only have a month.

So, what has happened is for some reason HMRC has blissfully ignored your state pension for the purposes of taxing your LA pension all these years - and then there was some trigger to make them sit up and take notice. I presume you have had the LA pension for at least the same time as the state pension, so it can’t be that.

There’s many people I think who receive a UK taxable pension and when their state pension comes into play haven’t needed to send a DTT form for it - at least till now.

Also if the UK taxable pension was small then there wouldn’t have been a need to send a DTT form for the state pension, e.g. if the state pension was 8K and the UK taxed pension 4K, it would still have been below the 12570 tax free allowance, so no tax.

But state pensions are going up, so bringing more people into that net.

With yourself of course it seems you would always have been above the tax free allowance with both pensions.

It seems just plain weird that they ignored your state pension all these years - maybe they ignored it for everyone and have now made a policy change -Thoughts anyone?

I’m tagging @George1 here coz he did deal with HMRC inspectors / systems in a previous life, maybe you have a theory on this ‘wierdness’ George?

Good luck Bonzocat, I hope you don’t have to wait too long for a fix!

24

Thanks @larkswood12 for all the information, very kind of you, but I have one more question before I ring the HMRC tomorrow. I know what I want to say, but will HMRC ask for any information, say my national insurance number for example? I don’t want to ring them and find I don’t have any info they might be asking for. If that makes any sense!

25

No probs, yes NI number needed, address, DOB if I recall.

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26

France form 1

27

I completely agree with @larkswood12 as to the likely causes and remedy. I have no idea why HMRC have relatively recently included the UK state pension in the PAYE, though they would be technically correct to do so in the absence of the Form France Individual…Like @Mark I think HMRC will want the stamped and completed Form France Individual before removing the state pension from their coding or certainly before refunding the tax over withheld in the recent past.

@Bonzocat can probably speed up the resolution by emailing the form to your local Impôts/visit them etc if they’re usually helpful - mine prints it out, stamps it and it comes back by return… HMRC told me that Tuesday - Thursday am’s are the quietest time to call and you may be able to get the first responder to escalate matters to a technician.

For me the order of play is to establish with HMRC whether it is indeed the state pension being taxed by them that has caused this situation, then getting that form, once signed and stamped by the Impôts asap to hmrc. Then follow up in a couple of months by phone via the technician route…I agreed with larkswood that previously HMRC have often ignored the existence of the state pension, especially if covered by the personal allowances.

Good luck Do let us know how you get on…

28

Will do, thanks.

29

One more question. I’ve downloaded 2 documents! Which one do I use? 01 or 02. Or are they essentially the same?

01
01768×783 175 KB

02
02768×743 166 KB

30

To quote Manuel, when it comes to pensions and tax, “I know nothing” so Kudos to @larkswood12 for their help… :muscle:

31

The top one (01,in English only) is the current version of the form, the bottom one was its predecessor (it is in English and French, and for some unearthly reason was replaced by the English only one about 4 years ago). I would definitely use the top one, just to keep things simple and to avoid any possible confusion at the Impôts/HMRC.

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32

Well, I called HMRC this morning and was told that my 2024 Tax Code is currently 106L but would be changed to 1280L in April this year, and that any reimbursement for the extra income tax I paid back in 2022/2023 would take place automatically and that I need only to wait. Nothing else for me to do.

I asked if I should send the ‘Form France Individual’ and she said that I should, but I said there would be many questions on that form I couldn’t possibly answer. I haven’t a clue as to the exact date I came to live in France for example! She understood. I will make an attempt, with lots of explanations added!

Anyway, the problem seems to have been resolved, except why my tax code changed from 1257L in 2021 to 350L, 312L and 106L in the years 2022 & 2023. But I’m not bothered!

Assuming all is well, I say thank you to all who came to my rescue. You’ve been most kind!

33

Footnote – I rang HMRC at 9.30am this morning and waited 25 minutes to speak to an advisor. When I had explained why I was calling, I was transferred, presumably to a tax technician, but the call ended suddenly just as I spoke to the technician. A robo-voice interrupted to say ‘The call is ended. Goodbye’.

I called again straight away and waited another 25 minutes, and explained what had happened to a new technician who asked for my phone number to call me back if the same thing happened again. She was very friendly, efficient and most helpful.

34

Congrats! Changing the code to 1280 might be their way of paying you back some tax - for the rest I wonder will it be paid back through your LA or will they send you a cheque? And - will you get a coding notice sent !?!

Interesting that they aren’t too bothered about the DTT form - as it was you that prompted. The technician must have seen your France address - and common sense prevailed. If HMRC have been exempting state pension for foreign resident retirees without DTT forms, then they may not want an inundation of 3 million forms from all those retired brits!

PS On the robo-voice terminator I got that once as well, bloody annoying.

35

It looks like real progress has been made, you must be delighted and relieved…well done.

If you do go ahead with filing the Form, (and for peace of mind in future - to try and prevent further HMRC repetition - I would definitely recommend this) should you find any questions that are difficult for you, don’t hesitate to flag them up here, or via PM if you’d prefer that route. There are several people on SF who are hardened veterans of previous Form France Individual campaigns. There’s probably little between us that we haven’t had to grapple with ourselves previously. There are also some questions that even HMRC admit are ambiguous, and I’m certain we can collectively help - if needed…

Otherwise bon courage…

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36

I think I understood her to say that HMRC would notify me around April. We shall see.
She had my address and my phone number on her monitor and seemed to know much about me. A worthwhile hour and a half on the telephone! She did ask for my phone number but before I said much more than 05 46…she said she could see it on her monitor.

37

That’s a real pain, I know. I had a tax rebate from HMRC after I moved to France and I asked them to put it into my UK bank account. They said that it wasn’t allowed, and that they had to send me a cheque. Even though I’d changed my address to the French address and had letters there from them, they sent the cheque to my old UK address. It took several months to sort out that the cheque hadn’t arrived, why, and then to cancel and resend the cheque. Of course it was a sterling cheque, which I then had to post back to the UK to my UK bank for cashing. All in all a painful experience.

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38

When I first rang HMRC, robo-voice asked for my postal code, and asked 3 times because my French postal code wasn’t recognised. Robo-voice then asked for any previous postal code I could remember. I remembered my London postal code from more than 30 years ago.

When I had to ring again, I was asked what my postal was 3 times as before, but robo-voice then went on to ask other questions and didn’t ask for a previous postal code.

Robo-voice has a mind of its own somewhat!

39

Yes, it was a relief. Now I can fill in ‘Form France Individual’ at leisure, and not panic!

40

Just had a quick skim of the Budget in one of the sub-papers of the FT.

It’s another fat cat budget with very little for working people other than bit of posturing. Like making anyone who is a carer get a threshold to start paying tax only at a starting income of more than a figure over 18,000 Pounds. And index linked (unlike other thresholds right now). Increasable per person cared for which sounds very caring. While anyone else still has to start paying tax at 12,500 or so.

So it kind of postures, but is wide open for rent-a-grannies for the taxably astute. And there’s a few things like that.

Looks like they tried to tighten up on non-doms by removing the Remittance Basis - i.e. theoretically all their income earned in the UK is now taxable and not just a reasonable proportion that they have paid to them in the UK (as compared to paying the rest into their local tax haven or international tax avoidance vehicle). But any serious non dom is already making the most of the generous “I’m in the UK today earning money but not really as I will be leaving before midnight” rules. So much of their time here doesn’t count so they are not resident as not spending enough days in the UK so not liable to tax (again/still).

And anyone who can claim to have a business is laughing - limits removed on R & D, “Expenses” Regime now permanent - meaning the entirety of quite a lot of large things bought can be taken off the profits of the business before they are taxed, immediately all in the same year, rather than having to depreciate i.e. take a little bit of it off your profits before tax, to reduce your profits that are then taxed, every year for a number of years. Income for business (and therefore tax) is now reduced immediately for anything they can dream up they would like to spend on. Though I expect the small print will take motor cars out of that so they will still have to be depreciated/deducted from tax slowly over a number of years. But wide open for lots of other stuff.

Income tax things like Inheritance Tax Thresholds frozen till 2027. So if the economy deteriorates → the FX rate gets worse for those spending in Euros and interest rates go up, even pensioners on basic state pension will be taxed from about 2026…maybe even 2025… even under some quite low inflation/interest rate assumptions.

So the Tories have widened the gaps for the wealthy and the tax savvy and businesses to avoid lots of the taxes that pay for hospitals and schools used by the workers. Oh, and tougher sanctions by the DWP on anyone that they choose to victimise for apparently not increasing their work hours enough, especially if they have children, or being unwilling to take any job the DWP wants them to as needing to care for children is not an excuse.

I dont think it’s enough to save the Tories do you?

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