IHT409 Pensions

bikeman

Can anyone shed any light on IHT409. When I complete the questions answered I end up on Q22, did the deceased or their employer make any contributions?

The boxes, 23 and 24, provide little room for an answer beyond a summary and a figure.

The issue I have is that I have then completed the form and nowhere have I been asked for the pension providers name, address, policy number etc.

Also, nowhere have I been asked for any background e.g. state of health, whether these payments were a continuation of a pattern of payments or not - a pretty important point I would have thought.

In short this form doesnt seem to be fit for purpose. Anyone have experience of submitting this form and then hmrc following up with lots of questions?

Keep_pedalling

In the vast majority of cases these payments do not impact IHT and there is no need to provide further information. HMRC are only likely to look into this further if it looks like the deceased dumped large sums into a pension once they know they have a limited time to live as a way of bypassing the 7 year rule. 

bikeman

ok but the form doesnt ask for any details only the amount. As it doesnt ask if this amount has increased it doesnt provide any useful information.

Also it doesnt distinguish between defined benefit and defined contribution pensions. In our case the lady had a db pension which didnt allow additional contributions anyway, but again, there's no where to state this. But I still have to go around the loop of requesting her pension provider provide her own and her employer contributions over the previous 2 years, while knowing that they are a fixed percentage of her salary and she could not raise or lower them even if she wanted to. And no doubt hmrc will ask for further information. What a waste of time.

Keep_pedalling

Unfortunately HMRC don’t make things easy by providing guidance in simple non ambiguous English. 

DB schemes are usually non contributory schemes so based on the HMRC manual I think this even needs declaring as the payment are neither substancial or unusual.

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/inheritance-tax-manual/ihtm17015