Do we still need to worry about PIPs?

[gadgetmind]

Pension Input Periods have been the bane of my life for many a year, though I have managed to be creative with them at times as I have multiple pensions I can contribute to.

During 20145/16, all PIPs were forced to align with the tax year, which makes lots of sense. Wow, I thought, I can now retire my massively complex PIP and Carry Forward spreadsheet, but maybe not?

The payment from my employer into my Group Personal Pension is paid at the end of the month but can drift by several days. If the March payment drifts then it could go past April 5th. I usually nag payroll at the end of March and ask that they make sure that they upload the data to Friends Life nice and early, but it's not under my control.

But will HMRC actually care any longer? Can we just assume all pension payments made by our employers for the months of that tax year actually went into out pensions in that tax year?

[parallellines]

In general, it depends on the type of pension scheme. For your GPPP I think you need to keep nagging payroll though.

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manual ... /ptm053200

(half way down the page)

[gadgetmind]

Thanks for that. That's how it's always worked before, and I record the dates on a monthly basis and track it all in a very complicated spreadsheet. I even have diagrams showing which payments to which pensions drop into which tax years so that my accountant can understand it!

I'd already simplified things by getting FL to open a new pot that was tax year aligned (and only contribute to this pot) and now HMG have forced every pot to align. I hoped that they'd maybe started to be more relaxed regarding the exact dates of payments but clearly not.

Payroll will continue to get their annual late March nag!

[WhiteSheep]

Your pension provider should be able to provide you with a contribution statement? But I keep a spread-sheet too.

I am not sure that HMRC put much effort into enforcing this rule. FWIW I got this wrong for many years and simply declared the contributions deducted from my salary (the PIP was already aligned with the tax year) and despite the fact that they can actually check the contribution history in real-time in their system nobody ever complained. And they seemed almost annoyed when I asked to update the contribution history retrospectively. Furthermore, a completely unrepresentative poll among my work colleagues showed that the majority got this rule wrong and had never heard from HMRC.