Actress who went to war with taxman over her missing pension
AS AN actress, Beth Porter is used to putting on shows of anger, frustration and despair. her talents landed her film roles in Woody Allen’s comic romp Love And Death and alongside Robert Redford in the Great Gatsby.
her many tV appearances include the BBC drama the Baby’s Name Being Kitchener with Leonard Rossiter.
But there is nothing put on about the rage the 72- year- old has for hM Revenue & Customs. She has fought a 13-year battle with them, claiming that its incompetence has cost her half of her state pension.
Beth, who was born in New york, but lives in Frant, East Sussex, says: ‘I’ve been stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare for years and am at the end of my tether.
‘Quite apart from my struggle to try to unearth why I haven’t got a bigger pension, the way I’ve been treated has been devastating.
‘I’ve experienced everything from rude staff to letters being ignored, promises of phone calls that never materialise, documents being lost and failure to supply promised information. I’m at such a loss to describe just how they have got it so wrong.’
Beth’s problems relate to the number of National Insurance contributions the taxman thinks she has paid.
Currently, to be eligible for a full state pension of £115.95 a week, you need to have paid National Insurance contributions for 30 years (though this will rise to 35 next year, and used to be 39 years).
For every year that you have not made NI contributions, you lose a proportion of the full state pension.
So, someone under the current system with only 15 years of contributions would get half the full state payout.
the problem is that you need to miss just a week’s worth of National Insurance contributions for a whole year to be classed as missing from your record.
When someone works full-time, their National Insurance will be docked automatically from their pay packet. this ensures they never miss a payment.
But if someone is self-employed, such as an actress, it would be the worker’s responsibility to make sure their full contributions are up to date.
to further complicate matters, before 1975, paying National Insurance was optional for selfemployed married women. those who wanted to pay it had to opt to do so. When Beth arrived in Britain in 1968, she started work as a self- employed actor with a theatre troupe in London’s Drury Lane.
She claims she signed up to pay National Insurance contributions, having realised it would be important to have a pension of her own. She later became a permanent uK resident and married Peter Reid, who is Scots.
Beth worked in tV and films throughout the Seventies and Eighties before becoming a scriptwriter, producer and critic in the Nineties.
All this time she says she paid full National Insurance contributions, and at one point even employed an accountant to ensure she did so.
however, she does not have any records of this being the case. In 2002, when she reached 60 — then the retirement age for women — she applied for her basic state pension. She believed she had 34 years of contributions.
though this was not the 39 then needed for the full state pension, Beth thought it would still ensure a decent payout.
But when the pension service got in touch with her, it said she had just 19 qualifying years. As a result, she would get only half of the full state pension.
Beth complained, but hMRC was unable to tell her why her payout had been reduced.
the only information it could offer was that it had no record of any contributions made between 1968 and 1980. the tax records appeared to have been deleted, in line with hMRC’s standard policy.
She began writing letters to the taxman in 2002, but claims many of her queries were not answered, forcing her to keep writing back.
this painful to-ing and fro-ing continued until 2009, when she finally recruited the help of actors’ union Equity.
Beth says the Revenue has frequently sent documents with confusing or misleading information. Some of her letters did not receive replies for nearly six months.
Last year, she lodged a formal complaint with the tax Adjudicator — a de facto watchdog that rules on hMRC’s behaviour towards taxpayers.
She has just been awarded £500, one of the highest possible payouts to anyone suffering at the hands of the taxman.
But there is still no sign that she will be able to claim the missing pension. She is now taking her case to a separate tribunal.
hMRC said a thorough investigation had been completed to review all the contributions Beth had made. It could find no evidence of the alleged payments in its records nor that it had made a mistake.
An hMRC spokesman says: ‘ We are very sorry for the distress and inconvenience we have caused Ms Porter.
‘ her National Insurance information is correct, but in explaining it, there was too much confusion and delay on our part.
‘Ms Porter’s case is with our Disputes Decisions and Appeals team to review her case. they will write to her in due course.’