Additional NI contributions if you have full history but were contracted out

pinnks

Yep.  We have gone from 1 source of employment income each to 3 pensions each, 1 of which is a foreign pension each, taxable in foreign parts in a foreign language, oh joy.  Good that tax was my bread and butter for 30-odd years and that I am fluent in the other language but even so, every country's tax system (and legal drafting style) is different and generally one does not "learn" tax speak when learning another language, so yes, lots of research...

Spivved1987

An update on my position, and a query.

Because it is virtually impossible to avoid queueing for hours on the HMRC phone number (at one stage I held for an hour and then the call just ended from their end) I decided to do it all by snail mail, as their website says you can do. I sent a bundle of papers off on 13th March, including print-offs from the HMRC website. I highlighted in fluorescent marker the information they asked for which I was providing in my covering letter. Most importantly I sent a cheque for the necessary £500. I sent the lot off with Proof of Postage.

So far (a fortnight later) there is no sign of them presenting the cheque. As a taxpayer I am outraged at this inefficiency! The first rule of thumb when I worked in any organisation was  GET THE BLEEDIN' CHEQUE BANKED! Obviously when they do I will feel a lot more comfortable that the process is in hand.

The query regards my wife's situation. She needs to buy a bit of 2017-18 back (cost c£450) but does that cost go up after 5th April 2024? In which case we will need to get our skates on to avoid a price increase, and I will probably need to chain her to the telephone so we can get a HMRC payment code for the Voluntary Payment and get it done online. As I said before, I can't understand why these codes cannot be sent to the individual's Tax Portal, which is used for communicating other sensitive information.

molerat

The query regards my wife's situation. She needs to buy a bit of 2017-18 back (cost c£450) but does that cost go up after 5th April 2024? In which case we will need to get our skates on to avoid a price increase

2017-18 will increase in price after July this year from the current £15.85 per week to £17.45 per week - you will be able to work out the actual cost from this.  It will cease to be available from April 2024

p00hsticks

Spivved1987 said:

An update on my position, and a query.

Because it is virtually impossible to avoid queueing for hours on the HMRC phone number (at one stage I held for an hour and then the call just ended from their end) I decided to do it all by snail mail, as their website says you can do. I sent a bundle of papers off on 13th March, including print-offs from the HMRC website. I highlighted in fluorescent marker the information they asked for which I was providing in my covering letter. Most importantly I sent a cheque for the necessary £500. I sent the lot off with Proof of Postage.

So far (a fortnight later) there is no sign of them presenting the cheque. As a taxpayer I am outraged at this inefficiency! The first rule of thumb when I worked in any organisation was  GET THE BLEEDIN' CHEQUE BANKED! Obviously when they do I will feel a lot more comfortable that the process is in hand.

The fact that you seem to have felt it necessary to include a 'bundle of papers' with what you felt were the relevant bits highlighted, rather than a simple one-page covering letter containing only the information asked for (name, address, phone number, NI number, the amount of the enclosed payment and what year(s) you want to pay for, together with a cheque for the amount with your NI number written on the back) probably won't help - it will all have to be scanned in and someone is probably going to have to now wade through it all manually to try to extract the relevant information. 

I can't find the relevant thread at present, but I think someone has given us an update in the last day or so to say that the cheque they sent at the beginning of the month has just shown as being cashed whcih suggests that there is a currently backlog of about a month with the post.....

Spivved1987

molerat said:

The query regards my wife's situation. She needs to buy a bit of 2017-18 back (cost c£450) but does that cost go up after 5th April 2024? In which case we will need to get our skates on to avoid a price increase

2017-18 will increase in price after July this year from the current £15.85 per week to £17.45 per week - you will be able to work out the actual cost from this.  It will cease to be available from April 2024

Sorry, meant to say 5th April 2023 in  my original post.

Spivved1987

p00hsticks said:

The fact that you seem to have felt it necessary to include a 'bundle of papers' with what you felt were the relevant bits highlighted, rather than a simple one-page covering letter containing only the information asked for (name, address, phone number, NI number, the amount of the enclosed payment and what year(s) you want to pay for, together with a cheque for the amount with your NI number written on the back) probably won't help - it will all have to be scanned in and someone is probably going to have to now wade through it all manually to try to extract the relevant information. 

I can't find the relevant thread at present, but I think someone has given us an update in the last day or so to say that the cheque they sent at the beginning of the month has just shown as being cashed whcih suggests that there is a currently backlog of about a month with the post.....

Well, perhaps 'bundle' was over-egging it a bit for dramatic effect. There were three enclosures in addition to the cheque:

(1) The covering letter (difficult to avoid);

(2) A print of the single page from my Personal Tax Account giving the quote for the amount to buy back 2016-17 gap;

(3) A print of the HMRC single page What to include taken from their web page on "Pay Class 3 Voluntary Contributions by Cheque".

So, three pages plus one cheque in total. Hardly War and Peace. I would have been quite happy to send the whole lot (apart from the cheque!) as PDFs if they made it possible to communicate by e-mail, thus saving the poor photocopying grunt the onerous task. But they don't, so I couldn't.