Having now undergone 3 separate rounds of preparing, submitting and agreeing Form France Individuals (FFI) with HMRC, I thought it might be helpful to set out some practical suggestions that might help others going
through similar. I have also drawn on the very helpful experiences posted on SF by others, notably @JoCo and @larkswood12 . Advance apologies for the weird formatting…
FFI is the formal mechanism to make a claim under the UK/France double tax treaty that a UK private sector and/or UK state pension is a) exempted from UK tax, and b) only subject to French tax for French residents. There are special rules for many UK government service pensions, which are not covered in this note (as the FFI process generally doesn’t apply, though there are exceptions). Agreement of the FFI should lead to i) a refund of UK tax withheld to date on payments from the private sector pension plans, and ii) the issue of PAYE NT (No Tax) codes to cover future payments. It is very unlikely HMRC will agree to either i) or ii) without an FFI. Currently there is no tax withheld on the UK state pension, though that is likely to change in the next few years as personal tax allowances are frozen whilst
the UK state pension (hopefully!) increases and may in time exceed the allowances, triggering PAYE.
Although not a requirement, I do recommend editing and completing the FFI PDF using a PDF writer to enter the data, simply to make it a little easier and straightforward for the HMRC agents to
process/read/understand/prioritise over a potentially more difficult-to-decipher hand-written version.
Most of the questions are fairly self explanatory. The key question, and one that HMRC concede is rather
ambiguous, is Part B, question 3 which asks from what date will you pay French tax on the income in question. HMRC will generally expect that date to be the date you became French tax resident, NOT the date you eventually
actually pay over the French tax due, which might be many months later.
In part C2, you will need to obtain the PSTR, or Pension Scheme Tax Reference from your pension provider. My experience is that the pension
teams triaging your request are sometimes not familiar with this, and they may provide a variety of irrelevant references. Ask them to escalate the question to their Technical teams.
In Part D, dealing with refunds, I strongly recommend providing evidence of tax withheld. A really helpful piece of evidence, for those that have the HMRC app and/or an HMRC Personal Tax Account is the real time schedule
of payments made and tax withheld, which satisfies HMRC that you have suffered tax, and helps quantify the refund. Obviously for ongoing payments, it will soon become out of date but it is sufficient proof of
withholding. A recent payslip or P60/P45 will usually also suffice.
Strangely Part D doesn’t mention the option of having a tax refund simply paid to your bank account (it seems to envisage cheques), but this is the place to request that this happens, and to provide the appropriate
banking details. It also doesn’t mention how to get an NT code. Again, ask for it, even if there is no particular box to enter this request.
Ask your Impots, who need to stamp and sign FFI, whether they will accept an emailed version, via your Impots secure messaging facility, for them to print off, stamp/sign, scan back in and return, My Impots
volunteered this as it saves them time,and saves you having to request a meeting. Others have experienced a variety of different approaches, including even an insistence on seeing the pre 2020 bilingual version.
Since 2020, FFI is in English only.
Send a scanned copy of the stamped version, (keep the original!) to HMRC, ideally using La Poste’s registered international mail delivery. The bar code reference you get from La Poste also works on the Royal Mail
tracking system when your letter reaches the UK (and La Poste often stops tracking it at that point). Royal Mail also helpfully routinely show the signature of the receiving mail room agent, as well as a date and time of
receipt.
Give HMRC two months grace, then call them, and ask to speak to a Technician about a tax treaty claim. They will inevitably want to check they have received your FFI (to which the date, and signature evidence from
the process in 7. above can be helpful). A Technician confirmed to me that they prioritise the processing of regular monthly pensions, and lump sums, over irregular one offs. Typically, if you don’t call, they have a fairly
standard delay of up to six months before they will look at your claim.
If the FFI is complete, clear to understand etc, they will usually agree to process it immediately, and issue the appropriate refund and NT code. A call well before the end of the UK tax year (eg no later than February)
means that an NT code can automatically be processed in time by the pension provider to generate the refund of any tax withheld that UK tax year.
10.HMRC usually follow up with a letter to confirm the position for the record.
I can heartliy endorse all the recommendations listed by George, l skipped over a couple of date boxes on the form thinking they were not relevant but that caused the forms to be returned twice! Everybody is very pleasant when one can eventually get through on the phone but it appears that there is a strict review of every entry and unless every box is properly completed the process stalls. Follow George’s instuctions!
Perhaps not all departments but for us, yes.
We filled in the form as required and added an explanatory letter asking the impot to sign so that we could forward to UK.
Forms came back to us signed by impot within 3 weeks.
We have lived here 16 years so plenty of years of tax records here, perhaps that helped?
In our case the impots office is Perigueux.
Thank you JohnBoy this might make it easier for me to try to sort out getting this form done this year.
After all, we are now in the fallow period between the busiest parts of the tax years for both France and the UK which both fall heavily around March-April or so
I popped it into their public postbox (Bressuire dept, 79) on 21st December and received it back by post on the 28th with no problem, the FR part was aa breeze, sent to HMRC January, copies in Feb, March and April, finally received back in May with a refund cheque
This is the wording I propose to use in my request to the local tax office, based on wording George suggested earlier:
Chère Madame, Cher Monsieur,
Veuillez trouver ci-joint un formulaire prérempli, qui concerne la convention fiscale franco-britannique. L’objectif de ce formulaire est de rendre une pension d’un régime de retraite britannique (insert name of provider) imposable uniquement en France, en vertu de l’article 18 de la convention fiscale susmentionnée.
Pourriez-vous, s’il vous plaît, signer et dater le formulaire dans le coin inférieur gauche de la page 1 et appliquer votre cachet ?
Il faudrait me renvoyer le formulaire une fois signé, daté et tamponné, soit par courrier électronique, soit par courrier postal, à l’adresse suivante : (insert address).
Je vous remercie d’avance pour votre collaboration.
Perso I wouldn’t have said the objective of the form is to make a UK pension only taxable in France under the tax treaty provisions, even though that would be the outcome expected for me. As the form is not just used for pensions but also other forms of UK income (and who knows, presumably some types of capital as well) to ensure they are only taxed in France, as a resident in France.
So I might have said Mon objectif, in submitting this form to you is… And not L’objectif, de ce formulaire.
I may of course be completely wrong and I may be talking to a professional translator or interpreter but that jumped out at me.
Thank you for your wording! I will nick it in due course for my own letter to local Impôts.
Hi George
I’m just working my way through FFI and I can’t work out if I need to complete Part D. I moved to France in December 2020 and receive an NHS Pension (not classified as a Government pension). Do you happen to know if I need to list my monthly pension income in Part D or is the information I provide in Part C2 enough?
Thanks
Gideon
Hi Gideon, (key assumption is that your NHS pension is not treated as a UK government pension that the UK would then have full rights to tax).
The object of Part C is to ask HMRC to issue you with an NT (no tax) PAYE code going forwards, so you can receive future payments gross of any UK tax. That’s separate from Part D which is asking them to refund you any tax already withheld. Given you’ve been receiving your NHS pension in France for 3+ years, you have presumably had PAYE withheld from it, and want to to reclaim it. You do therefore want to complete Part C and D.
If you have copies of P60s/payslips (eg the latter for the month you moved to France) from the past 3 years, you should attach them to show the totality of tax withheld to date, for which you want a refund.They may even pay you interest!
Best of luck, and do please let us know how you get on.
Hi George,
Thanks so much for the advice. My wife and I both completed our forms and sent them off to our local tax office, using the secure messaging system. We were then delighted to get them back, signed and stamped, the very next day! Now to send them off to HMRC.
Cheers,
Gideon
Hi Gideon
Could you possibly keep us updated when you hear from HMRC? A good friend has just had his DTT form signed and stamped by the German tax office and has now sent it to HMRC. He’s wondering how long HMRC will take to act on it.
I would very strongly recommend your friend takes the initiative and contacts HMRC (say) two months after they’ve received the FFI (see points 7 & 8 of my guidance at the top of this thread)… Otherwise your friend will probably face (what HMRC have told me on more than one occasion) is a 6 month backlog for dealing with FFI approvals. They will prioritise resolving regular pensions and 100% lump sums over one off or irregular payments, apparently.
I think this question is closely related to FFI but not exactly and reading the bumf I’ve just received from HMRC I am more confused than ever so am hoping someone (@George1 perhaps ?) can enlighten me.
I have a tax code NT with HMRC and have done for many years now. The problem started when I decided to take a small stakeholder pension that’s been sitting in a pension pot for ever. Since it was sold on multiple times and the current holders don’t do annuities, I had to take it as a lump sum. A huge amount of tax was taxen off it before payment. After talking to HMRC I was told that my tax rate had been reset to NT and that I should expect a cheque for the refund in about a month.
3 months later, I received a letter whose first paragraph said -
Thank you for send us your form P53 to claim a tax refund on a small lump sum pension. This was to claim back tax paid on a lump sum payment made to you in the year 2024 to 2025.
I cannot accept your claim for repayment. This is because you live outside the UK
The upshot is that I’m supposed to fill in a different form (R43, not the one I was told before) but looking at it, it doesn’t seem to be all that appropriate and asks for lots of details I don’t have.
The letter goes on to tell me that I may still need to pay tax on my UK income blah blah blah …
Thanks @mark - I think you’re right in that it’s the way to go. I was so pleased when I thought I’d managed it 3 months ago but I get the idea that the person who wrote the letter was clearing their desk
