Arborbridge wrote:I've have something wrong here, then, but won't have time to look into until tomorrow. My dividends around 2013-2014 were noted as around the 21p mark so there's a big difference. Maybe "rights" or "reits" have screwed me up somewhere.
Looks very likely to be "reits", since British Land is a REIT, the withholding tax on PIDs paid by REITs is at 20%, and "around the 21p mark" is about 20% less than 26.4p. Withholding taxes are deducted at source - i.e. taken out of a payment before it is made to you, so that you only receive the declared amount minus the tax, not the full declared amount - so when a withholding tax is involved, one has to be careful to distinguish between the declared payment and the payment one actually receives. Fortunately, there is no withholding tax on UK dividends - but despite being very dividend-like in function and practical nature, and often described as "dividends", PIDs are
not dividends in the strict sense, and a 20% withholding tax does apply to them.
The situation is complicated by the fact that REITs can make their payments as either normal dividends or PIDs, and further complicated by the fact that although ISAs, SIPPs and other tax shelters are exempt from the withholding tax, they can implement that exemption in two different ways: either by registering their holding as qualifying for the exemption, in which case the withholding tax won't be deducted at source, or by letting it be treated normally but then reclaiming the deducted withholding tax from the taxman later. Furthermore, that's not just a theoretical possible choice: in practice, some ISA providers do register as exempt, others reclaim (I'm certain of that because I have two equity ISA accounts and they differ in that respect - not ideal and I wouldn't have chosen it that way, but both accounts both from before REITs were introduced in 2007 and it's not troublesome enough to justify the cost of transferring IMHO). So basically, there are quite a few potential pitfalls to do with keeping records of PIDs.
Secondary sources like dividenddata do tend to have both strong points about making data available in convenient and consistent form, and weaknesses in the form of data errors and/or important details that they don't tell one about. I very much like dividenddata in that it makes the dividend history of all the companies it covers available in the same format, in both adjusted and unadjusted form and telling one enough detail about significant corporate actions to know their rough nature and what to look for if one is looking for more detail about them. This includes corporate actions like special dividends accompanied by share consolidations, which don't actually require an adjustment to the dividend amount to get a fair dividend-per-share history, but may well significantly affect one's dividend returns (depending on what one does with the special dividend) -
https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend ... y?epic=IHG is probably the prime example of that! It also has a very low error rate in my experience - indeed, I'm not certain I've encountered even one error yet in their dividend histories.
It's not so good as regards covering all companies (though I think it's entirely adequate for HYPs), and a minor criticism is that it's a bit deficient about what it tells one if there
aren't any significant corporate actions - when a page says nothing whatsoever about such actions (an example is
https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend ... ?epic=BATS), it isn't clear to a novice user whether that means that the site makes no attempt to cover them or that there aren't any. But it only takes a bit of looking around, e.g. at
https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend ... ?epic=BLND to establish that the site does make such an attempt. Another poor point is that in the case of REITs, it makes no attempt to distinguish PIDs from dividends proper - it just lumps them all in as "dividends". So it's definitely not a source for everything one might want to know about dividend amounts... And a final possible criticism is that its graphs aren't the most user-friendly in terms of presenting oddities - e.g. the IHG chart in the first of the above links apparently shows an eye-catching jump in the 2008 dividend and the BATS chart in the second an eye-catching downwards spike in the 2017 dividend. Both are artifacts of exactly what data is presented rather than a real issue about the dividends, and one can find the explanation of both on the page concerned, but the explanation of the second in particular won't be at all obvious to a novice.
All in all, I'd say that dividenddata is a fine first port of call for data about dividend amounts - not perfect, but I don't know of one with a better combination of convenience, accuracy and cost. The final point I would make is that when such a first port of call fails or comes under suspicion of being wrong/misleading, my experience is that the "horse's mouth" (i.e. the company's website) is the best second port of call for factual information about dividend amounts. Don't faff around with other secondary sources - if they disagree with each other, you've got to then work out which is right and which is wrong; if they agree, you're still left with the question of whether that's just because they're getting the data from the same intermediate supplier... Just find the company's website (googling "<company name> investor relations" is a good method, especially at getting the corporate website for a company that has a separate commercial website), and look for their dividend history page - most HYP companies do have one. In British Land's case, that quickly finds
http://www.britishland.com/investors/dividends, and expanding the data for the financial years from 2013 to 2018 shows that it does pay normal dividends, but only very occasionally - just once in the those years, when they paid the 4th interim for 2016 half as a PID and half as a normal dividend. Some other REITs pay significantly more in the way of normal dividends - e.g. a similar exercise for Segro produces
http://www.segro.com/investors/dividend ... sc_lang=en, which shows that for the last several years, it's paid its interim as a normal dividend and its final as a PID. So doing that sort of exercise is definitely needed if one wants to look at what the effect of being a REIT is on a company's actual payments.
In Arb's actual case of British Land for 2013, the British Land page shows that the payments were split 4*6.60p = 26.40p PIDs, no normal dividends. That's what one would have received in an ISA, SIPP or other tax shelter that has registered as exempt from the withholding tax.
Otherwise, the four payments actually received from the company would have been of 80% of 6.60p each, making the total 4*0.80*6.60p = 21.12p. If it was an ISA, SIPP or other tax shelter that reclaims, it would later have been credited with "tax credit" or similarly-named payments totalling 4*0.20*6.60p = 5.28p - so it would have received 26.40p in total, but only 21.12p of that directly from the company.
Gengulphus