Between 9 August and 5 November 2004 the Inland Revenue consulted on 18 draft Regulations under the Finance Act 2004. A summary of responses to the consultation has now been published, and a set of 14 new draft Regs (some of the original ones have been combined) issued for comment. No closing date is given, but the final Regs are promised for “later this year”.

40% of the comments the Revenue received were on the draft Provision of Information Regs alone. A number of respondents feared that the reporting obligations would result in a tax charge on very few members and as such placed unnecessary obligations on scheme administrators. The re-drafted regulations relax this burden. Schemes will now have some flexibility in satisfying themselves about whether or not a lifetime allowance charge is payable, and scheme administrators will now be obliged only to confirm to the Revenue that they have accounted for tax or will do so.

Another change likely to be particularly welcomed by the industry concerns the Relevant Annuities Regs. Many commentators had called for the the calculation of relevant annuity rates to use tables prepared by the Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) rather than the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA) comparative annuity tables. The regulations have been re-drafted in line with this.