It has come to STEP’s attention that in HMRC’s GOV.UK guidance on how to register a trust, the guidance about which beneficiaries need to be registered on the Trust Registration Service (TRS) differed in certain important respects from the HMRC guidance that was published on 22 November 2017.

For example, the GOV.UK guidance said: ‘When a member of a class becomes known they must be named, even if they have not benefited yet’, whereas HMRC’s 22 November 2017 guidance said: ‘…But where a beneficiary is un-named, being only part of a class of beneficiaries, a trustee will only need to disclose the identities of the beneficiary when they receive a financial or non-financial benefit…’.

STEP contacted HMRC about this discrepancy and it confirmed that the 22 November 2017 HMRC guidance ‘is still current and correctly reflects the requirement for trustees to disclose details of the identity of all named/known beneficiaries.’ HMRC has since made amendments to the GOV.UK guidance with regard to which beneficiaries must be disclosed.

HMRC also confirmed that although the GOV.UK guidance states that trusts that have registered for FATCA/CRS do not need to be registered on TRS, this is not accurate. The inaccuracy reportedly results from an incorrect transposition of guidance that was in the August 2018 Trusts and Estates Newsletter, which referred to trusts that need to report under FATCA or CRS that don’t have a Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR). To date, however, HMRC has not amended the GOV.UK guidance in this regard and STEP will be taking up this issue with HMRC.

Imogen Davies TEP, STEP UK Technical Committee