Prudential sounds emergency tax warning on pension pot withdrawals

Carmen Reichman
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The majority of people accessing their pensions for the first time will be overpaying tax, particularly if they withdraw large sums of cash, Prudential head of business development Vince Smith-Hughes has warned.

People rushing to draw large chunks of money from their pension pots from April 6 will likely fall into the tax office's emergency tax code because providers will not yet have obtained their normal income tax codes, Smith-Hughes suggested. Under new pension rules people will be able to withdraw a quarter of their pension pots tax-free and the remaining three-quarters taxed as if it were income. Emergency tax is a temporary code that assumes the lump sum taken is a regular monthly income, hence it pushes people into higher tax brackets when calculating their presumed annual income. ...

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