Well the link provides a depressing read. Both in terms of direction of travel and the usual commitment to as little as possible by the MOD to look after people or head off issues before they become crises. W
The problem is that it’s so damned complicated and the MOD does little to explain things, and if you talk to JPAC they are generally clueless. For instance, a few years back when they reduced the annual allowance to 40K/pa, I was told I had exceeded that one year and would have to carry over allowance from previous years. Fine, no tax bill, but I was a Sqn Ldr and it was just a routine year with nothing special I can recall. I was under the impression that it was Gp Capts upwards that would be hit, so God knows what will happen if they lower the allowance further. Morale is already fragile enough without mid-level people getting an extra tax bill for turning up to work!
But the question I have been mulling is just how do you calculate the annual pension value for tax allowance purposes? If you look in the worked examples of how the pension is calculate that were provided in the AFPS15 documents it’s simple - the annual input is 1/47 x salary plus indexation of previous years contributions. However the annual statements provided by JPAC - and which said I had overshot the limit as a baby Sqn Ldr - seem to use a completely different calculation and multiply the value given in the pension code by 20 and compare it to the previous year’s value. So which is the right way of doing it? And why the inconsistency of approach?