Octopus Money Pension drawdown question

DaveO

Hi, I was hoping someone has an Octopus Money Pension they are drawing down on so I could check if they have had a similar issue to me.

My pension was with Candid Financial who sold the business to Octopus Money a couple of years ago which meant my pension was transferred to the platform Octopus use which is Plannr.

No issues with this and last year my draw down payments arrived as expected. This year after they started again three months into the tax year after a tax free lump sum payment except - and this is the issue - they used a different payroll reference number than last year.

This has resulted in HMRC thinking I have two Octopus Money Pensions.

As I receive a state pension slightly higher than the tax free allowance I owe some income tax on it and the way HMRC deal with this is pay me the pension tax free and set a tax code against my private pension to claw the tax back. The trouble is they have set that tax code against the pension with last year’s payroll reference number which Octopus are no longer using. So I am not paying the correct rate of tax as this years payments are using the new payroll reference number which are being taxed at basic rate.

The only way I am aware of to tell HMRC the pension with the old payroll reference number does not exist is to say its closed but for that you need a P45.

Has anyone had a similar issue where each year’s pension drawdown payments use a different payroll reference number like this?

Notepad_Phil

I don't use Octopus myself, but if you have access to the HMRC personal tax portal then you could try to go onto that and set your expected income for the incorrect income stream to the actual amount you received this tax year. Hopefully that will cause the HMRC algorithms to realise that it needs to reallocate future tax payments to your new payroll reference.