Quote:
Originally Posted by Bibio
Seeker..
do you have a UK national insurance number?
if the answer is yes then you are entitled to state pension if you live in this country at retirement age.
are you self employed?
if the answer is no then why are you signing up for self assessment?
i dont know if you still can but at one time you could walk into your local tax office and get an interview.
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You have to sign up for self assessment if you receive more than £300 of foreign income and my pension comes from the US and is just sitting below the tax threshold (it only started late last year). There are, according to the gov website, different rules for foreign income versus foreign pensions. The website doesn't explain the difference and the lady I spoke to in HMRC didn't know either but she signed me up for SA. Apparently, signing up and enrolling are not the same thing which is why I was thwarted yesterday when attempting to reach the SA forms.
The US pension can be claimed, at a reduced rate, from the age of 62 which is what I did. I do have a NI number and I am entitled to a partial UK pension from the age of 66 (I don't have full NI contributions and attempting to pay catch up contributions was another HMRC can of worms which I eventually abandoned after 6 months of trying, this was explained in my HMRC gripe last year!). I am sure that HMRC employees are not incompetent but the difficulty of speaking to someone quickly (I think that waiting in excess of 22 minutes is too long), the fact that they don't have an email connection (viruses perhaps?) makes dealing with them frustrating. In the case of catch up contributions, I wasn't allowed to speak to anyone in that department (since I'd been out of the country, if I'd missed them when I was in the UK it would have been different). After months, they sent a letter asking for more info and informing me that if I'd supplied a phone number they could have called me (my phone number was on a cover letter).
There is, apparently, a tax office in Grimsby but when you look it up it says:
"Please do not write to or visit this office". They do have a phone number maybe I'll give them a call, although (in theory) the code allowing me to access the SA forms should be now snail-mailing its way towards me. I did notice that the reviews for the Gy tax office were from 2 years ago. (edit: it closed 2 years ago)