Urgent Guidance Needed - State Pension, NICs & HMRC

Smudgeismydog

As @DRS1 said, you can view your NI record online. This shows all years and whether they are full or not

sheramber

I think you need to know what years you are paying  to make a payment. 

Rinchen

Thank you very much for your further response DRS1. It's been remarkable that so many people within the HMRC have provided information that i) directly contradicts what I was told by other agents and ii) is completely factually wrong and wasted hours of time (the Future Pension Centre say it's all too common and is simply unacceptable). Thanks to your valuable advice, I accessed my online files and found a message from the HMRC telling me to cease submitting tax returns in 2017. On that basis, I decided to ring the NI office and approached it as per Marcon's helpful suggestion. The agent checked with a supervisor and they said that if I can provide figures of profits for the missing years, they will feed the amount for each missing year into a computer programme, which will confirm, based on its computations, whether I am eligible for Class 2 or if I am liable for Class 3. So I'm in a situation of doing five tax returns simultaneously for 2017 onwards. I'm thinking of ringing them to convey the outcome of the simplest annual calculation so I can see if the computer programme confirms Class 2; otherwise, all the hours spent gathering this sizeable amount of historical data may be wasted. Many thanks once again for your guidance, which I really appreciate.  

DRS1

I may be wrong but I think for some recent years if you have been below a figure then you need to pay voluntary (Class 2) contributions and if you have been above it you maybe get credited with Class 2 contributions.  Then there may have been years when you were credited with the Class 2 contributions even when you were below the figure.  Class 3 will probably get you if you weren't carrying on any business at all for a tax year.

Rinchen

My apologies for this much later-than-planned response. I want to send sincere thanks to Marcon, DRS1, sheramber and Smudgeismydog for your deeply appreciated responses, helpful comments, insightful pointers and welcome suggestions. I can't thank you enough.

I am so glad to say that, after a few more extended calls, I managed to clarify the situation enough to move forward. Of the four potential scenarios—broadly, borderline-cataclysmic, dreadful and demoralising (the original scenario asked for a £15k payment), disappointing but not terrible (just over £5k), and what I should have paid if everything had been understood and correctly in place (under £2k)—the second-best option worked out.

So while it's unfortunate that I ended up paying quite a lot more due to genuine historical confusions over how the various systems involved work in practice, it could have been *so* much worse. 

I'm delighted to say that, given my records for the outstanding annual calculations were all well organised and demonstrably within the allowable thresholds and categories, I was able to pay the right number of qualifying years and make the outstanding payments. If I continue with the Class 2s until retirement, I should have a full state pension, which is something close to a miracle. 

Your help couldn't have come at a better time. I am so grateful for your immensely helpful and deeply appreciated moral support and skilful pointers to get this decades-long issue over the line. This ends decades of worry (and countless postponed must-do notes) about finalising this long-overdue matter. 

Please never doubt that you can make a life-changing difference with your incredibly valuable MSE Forum responses. I, for one, shall be giving heartfelt thanks for your help for many years to come.