UK Pension & Voluntary Payments Questions

[beanhead]

As I wrote in this thread, when I back paid my voluntary contributions, I added up the amounts in the 'offer' they made and paid in full. Despite this, one year was listed as 'Not complete' or 'not full' on the gateway site.
I wrote to them to ask them to fix this, but no response.
Today, I called HMRC. (got through almost straight away).
The lady checked and agreed with me that my calculations and payments were correct, but that someone had 'messed up' the allocation. She could not fix it, since I am a Rest Of World person, which requires a special caseworker. She would pass it on to the correct department and it would be fixed, I was assured.

Merry Xmas to me. I checked on the uk gov page today and the record has been corrected. Hurrah!

I now have 20 years paid in full. 17 more years to go to reach full contributions of 35 years
(I read the post where banders explained why this is calculated like this...I will just have to trust HMRC on that one, I think.)

I pay once a year through my NatWest account. Let's hope that stays open.

[MartoMiyagi]

Here is a strange one! Has anyone tried to back pay NICs via bank transfer recently?

I tried yesterday using the exact account details on my most recent letter from HMRC. The account number and sort code did not match the account name: 'GBS Re NICO Receipts HMRC'

I also tried following the online instructions for paying class two contributions. Again I stumbled with the account name. Following the online instructions to pay in to an account named 'HMRC NIC Receipts' failed to match up to the numbers. I was given a choice of accounts to pay in to. 'Deficient payments Newcastle' or 'Quarterly payments Newcastle'

It was my intention to back pay 14 years worth, plus the current year so I want to make sure the (almost) 2.5 grand ends up in the right place.

I fear a phone call might be my only solution!

PS: Huge thanks to Ben and all contributors to this forum for giving me the information and motivation to get this all organized!

[kuma]

Wise to ask for clarity, as that's not HMRC's strong suit when it comes to voluntary NICs!

Others have reported similar; see the below link. It seems HMRC have changed their account details for voluntary NICs from 2023/4 onwards (but the old account is still valid for contributions covering years up to 2022/3).

See this HMRC Community forum thread:

The HMRC admin answer can be distilled as:

Payments for years up to and including 2022/3 from UK bank accounts
Sort code: 80 32 20
Account no.: 12001004
Account name: HMRC NIC Receipts
Reference: NINO followed by ‘IC’, surname then initial. If limited to a certain amount of characters, use NINO followed by ‘IC’ and as much of the surname as possible. Example: if your name is Anne Jones and your NINO is QQ123456A, you would write the reference as QQ123456AICJONESA

Payments for 2023/4 onwards from UK bank accounts
Sort code: 20 20 48
Account no.: 30944793
Account name: GBS Re NICO Receipts HMRC
Reference: NINO followed by ‘IC’, surname then initial. If limited to a certain amount of characters, use NINO followed by ‘IC’ and as much of the surname as possible. Example: if your name is Anne Jones and your NINO is QQ123456A, you would write the reference as QQ123456AICJONESA

There may be further HMRC errors and inconsistencies to navigate. Persevere, as the reward is worth it! And do post re the resolution as I suspect multiple readers of this thread may face similar circumstances.

[MartoMiyagi]

Kuma,

Thank you for your info from the community thread. I had no idea such a thing existed. I fully agree its worth persevering with this.

I did call yesterday at bang on 8am UK time and got through to a human pretty quickly. The guy was helpful and gave me hope that his information would help me to get the payment through. He was also keen to run through ALL the details of my quoted back payment rates and other ways to pay.

He gave me those same details:

Sort code: 80 32 20
Account no.: 12001004
Account name: HMRC NIC Receipts ( He said to put a hyphen between each word) This gave me hope I might succeed!

So, off I went to try and pay via Barclays online baking again. The result.... Nada. Still being given the option to choose from these two account names:

'Deficient payments Newcastle' or 'Quarterly payments Newcastle'
Both of the these actually listed the above same account no. and sort code details. When I mentioned this to the HMRC call staff, he said it could be a problem with my account not being able to make this kind of transfer. This, I highly doubt since I have recently made various transfers from the very same account.

Also the Barclays app warned me that the reference entered (NINOICsurname) was invalid for both of these account names. These two factors made think paying in this way risked opening another can of worms. Especially since the advisor told me, any payments made can take 8 weeks to show up.

I decided to order a cheque book from my UK bank and do it the old fashioned way!

[Wales4rugbyWC23]

Kuma,

Thank you for your info from the community thread. I had no idea such a thing existed. I fully agree its worth persevering with this.

I did call yesterday at bang on 8am UK time and got through to a human pretty quickly. The guy was helpful and gave me hope that his information would help me to get the payment through. He was also keen to run through ALL the details of my quoted back payment rates and other ways to pay.

He gave me those same details:

Sort code: 80 32 20
Account no.: 12001004
Account name: HMRC NIC Receipts ( He said to put a hyphen between each word) This gave me hope I might succeed!

So, off I went to try and pay via Barclays online baking again. The result.... Nada. Still being given the option to choose from these two account names:

'Deficient payments Newcastle' or 'Quarterly payments Newcastle'
Both of the these actually listed the above same account no. and sort code details. When I mentioned this to the HMRC call staff, he said it could be a problem with my account not being able to make this kind of transfer. This, I highly doubt since I have recently made various transfers from the very same account.

Also the Barclays app warned me that the reference entered (NINOICsurname) was invalid for both of these account names. These two factors made think paying in this way risked opening another can of worms. Especially since the advisor told me, any payments made can take 8 weeks to show up.

I decided to order a cheque book from my UK bank and do it the old fashioned way!

I would be surprised if you manage to get a cheque book from your Bank, they are very unwilling to send out new ones. I just got one from Lloyds about six years ago, after they demerged from TSB. Funnily enough the only thing that I pay with cheques is HMRC for my voluntary national insurance contributions.

[kuma]

Sorry, typo corrected in the below… 08 not 80:

Wise to ask for clarity, as that's not HMRC's strong suit when it comes to voluntary NICs!

Others have reported similar; see the below link. It seems HMRC have changed their account details for voluntary NICs from 2023/4 onwards (but the old account is still valid for contributions covering years up to 2022/3).

See this HMRC Community forum thread:

The HMRC admin answer can be distilled as:

Payments for years up to and including 2022/3 from UK bank accounts
Sort code: 08 32 20
Account no.: 12001004
Account name: HMRC NIC Receipts
Reference: NINO followed by ‘IC’, surname then initial. If limited to a certain amount of characters, use NINO followed by ‘IC’ and as much of the surname as possible. Example: if your name is Anne Jones and your NINO is QQ123456A, you would write the reference as QQ123456AICJONESA

Payments for 2023/4 onwards from UK bank accounts
Sort code: 20 20 48
Account no.: 30944793
Account name: GBS Re NICO Receipts HMRC
Reference: NINO followed by ‘IC’, surname then initial. If limited to a certain amount of characters, use NINO followed by ‘IC’ and as much of the surname as possible. Example: if your name is Anne Jones and your NINO is QQ123456A, you would write the reference as QQ123456AICJONESA

Cheque sounds a good workaround.

I ordinarily pay from Wise and the bank transfers have been smooth. (And now I know that from 2023/4 payments onwards I’ll need to pay to a different HMRC account…)