There have been some recent changes regarding UK pension regulations. One impact of this is that UK Revenue (HMRC) has introduced a new QROPS requirement that a scheme/product cannot accept a transfer unless retirement before age 55 is prohibited. This is known as the ‘pension age test’.

Some of you may be in receipt of recent correspondence in relation to this from HMRC which refers to this ‘pension age test’ and its introduction from 6 April 2015. Scheme Managers are required to respond to HMRC by 17 June 2015 to confirm whether their scheme continues to meet the QROPS requirements. If a response is not received HMRC will exclude the scheme from being a QROPS and it will be removed from the published list.

Importantly HMRC confirm that whether a scheme is a QROPS will not affect the members who have already transferred to your scheme but if your scheme is no longer a QROPS you cannot accept new transfers without a 55% UK tax charge applying to the transfer. Therefore this change should not materially impact existing cases that have already received a transfer from a UK pension scheme.

Irish Life’s pension products do not meet this requirement. Consequently Irish Life (both Corporate Business and Retail) is now closed for any UK pension transfers into our QROPS approved products.

For Corporate Business this means that transfers will no longer be accepted into our QROPS Personal Retirement Bonds (PRBs).

Separately, we are aware that a number of Corporate Business group pension schemes were also registered as QROPS. Should we receive requests for UK transfers into Corporate Business group schemes in future, we will be informing the scheme contact that the scheme does not meet current QROPS approval requirements and that the transfer should not therefore be accepted.

Any questions or queries in relation to this can be passed to your usual Irish Life contact.