Crispy Duck

HMRC Admin 34 Response Please proof read your responses before you send them - your last response to ChristopherCaroll contains a bad link - the correct link should have been https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-when-you-can-expect-a-reply-from-hmrc i.e. without the stray %C2%A0 characters you managed to include in the link: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-when-you-can-expect-a-reply-from-hmrc%C2%A0

Graeme Ritchie has asked a very pertinent question - one I also found myself asking earlier this year. We, the great unwashed, should not have to ask such questions. If this was a commercial service, for example as with an insurance company, we would be entitled to claim if we did not receive an immediate receipt for the money, electronically via the HMRC App for example, alongwith exact guidance on when to expect the VCs to be fully processed and allocated to the relevant years. But no, HMRC does not do either of these obvious service-oriented tasks. I eventually noticed that the years I had voluntarily paid for had started to be tagged as "Full Years" in the HMRC App on my mobile phone, but absolutely no messages have been received from HMRC, either in the App or separately. Those of us that have spent professional careers in or around financial services where our success in business was rewarded only by the high service standards we practised, find this HMG lack of standards absolutely appalling, especially as most of us as customers frequenting this forum are around State Pension Age and trying to plan our income for retirement. My strong recommendation to the higher ups in both HMRC and DWP is that you really need to get a grip and understand the angst from uncertainty that you are unnecessarily causing us, the British civilians you are supposed to serve. This is especially so for citizens who are coming to the end of their self-sufficient earning lives, and necessarily placing their trust now in the UK state to do the right thing. If this post gets moderated out of existence, because my reports and opinion do not suit the higher ups or the moderators doing the hatchet work, then I shall not be surprised. I already had one post suffer the same fate - a question about whether GMP should in fact be a visible feature within the benefits of SERPs replacement insurance policies that many of us were encouraged by HMRC to sign up to in the late 80s (the second tranche of contracting out dreamed up by HMRC for SME's with DC schemes as opposed to the 1978 contracting out to larger employers with DB schemes). Those extra DC policies only ever received contributions from HMRC as a way to skip their future liabilities for even more SERPs than they managed to outsource to big employers from 1978. We employees never paid a penny into the policies, nor did our employers, but weeks after I asked the question, moderators wrote to say the question was too detailed. They could say that again. UK State Pensions have become ridiculously complicated over the years, and ridiculously opaque. All those involved with continuing to try to justify the current position of so much uncertainty for so many, should be ashamed.