Suffolk Life sees pension tax enquiries spike on 'annual allowance confusion'

Complicated transition rules may have led to breaches

Carmen Reichman
clock • 3 min read

Suffolk Life has seen a spike of enquiries from advisers about its ‘scheme pays' facility, suggesting more clients may have breached the annual allowance last year, following the government's "very complicated" transitional rules.

The self-invested personal pension (SIPP) provider said its adviser support team saw "unusually high numbers" of enquiries about freeing up money from clients' pension plans for tax settlements in the months since the tax year-end, leading it to suggest advisers have struggled to stay on top of the latest changes to the rules. It said normally those types of enquiries are "very few and far between". The government made a number of changes to pension taxation following its 2014-15 pension freedom reforms, which allowed all defined contribution savers to freely access their pots from the a...

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