Monica Lewis

Hi HMRC Admin 19 Thanks for your response. I will confirm whether it is a state pension or related to German employment but am pretty certain it is a state pension. Are you able to confirm whether an article 32(5) election to be reinstated? Thanks

Hi Gary Thanks for your comprehensive response. I can see from your responses to previous comments on this forum that you have an in depth understanding of what is definitely a complex issue! You are correct that her pension is administered by DRV and paid by Deutsche Post Renten Service and the last correspondence (which I translated using an online app) refers to ‘entitlement to standard old age pension’ so that does seem conclusive to me. I have seen that DRV will only communicate in German and unfortunately, although I do have a reasonable level of conversational German, I don’t think I would be able to speak to them to confirm this. I will try via email. I know that my Mum has never received any correspondence about the changes in tax treatment that you outline (she’s kept everything going back to 1997!) and she has zero knowledge of the Double Tax Treaty or any of its revisions so I’m at a total loss as to how pensioners of her age would be expected to know about these matters. Do you know whether an Article 32(5) election can be reinstated? It sounds like arrangements to pay tax via the German authorities can be problematic Thanks for your help in this matter

My mum has been receiving a pension from Germany for 30+ years and has always led me to believe that it’s an occupational pension. She is German and lived and worked there until 1959. Due to a recent request by HMRC to start submitting tax returns again I’ve been looking into her very large file of German documents and am now convinced that it’s a state pension. When she first received it she was completing annual tax returns and it was shown as foreign income and tax was recovered for this income via a UK paid widow’s pension. About 20 years ago HMRC advised her that she no longer needed to file tax returns and they continued to collect the tax via her UK widows pension (they estimated the amount each year and amended her tax code). It started to be shown by HMRC in tax code notifications as Forces Pension (she says that she raised this with them at the time but they were unable or unwilling to change the narrative). Since 2011 they have been refunding the entirety of tax paid on this amount each year. My questions are: 1. Should she be paying tax on this pension in Germany? (I requested a German pension receipt notification for 2023 and it states “The ZfA will transmit the data to the responsible state tax authorities. Because the data has already been transmitted, it is not necessary for you to transfer the reported data to your income tax return “. I’m not clear which state tax authority this refers to…Germany or UK?) 2. Should she declare this as German state pension on her UK tax return? The Double Taxation Relief documents referenced in earlier posts here have just left me confused as they seem contradictory