The Handbook has been designed to help navigate and explain the myriad of specific life insurance tax legislation. It is to provide an introduction to the many and varied rules relating to the taxation of life insurance businesses.
This version of the Handbook is intended to be a refresh rather than a rewrite of our previous edition from 2013. Although a lot of content remains unchanged, it now covers the life insurance implications of the substantial changes brought about in recent years. Other sections on Transfers of Business, Intangible Fixed Assets and Transfer Pricing have been given an update and spruce-up considering recent experience and insight. As with our previous edition, this Handbook no longer includes an example tax computation and also the previous sections on the detailed transitional adjustment rules into the Finance Act 2012 regime have been removed as ‘old news’.
It is noted that HMRC themselves carried out a project between 2018–2020 to rewrite the Life Assurance Manual (LAM) to take account of the Finance Act 2012 regime. Prior to this the industry and indeed HMRC were left to interpret the legislation unguided with only a few Interim Chapters on Transfers of Business, Allocation Rules and Transitional Provisions to refer to. We hope this refreshed Handbook complements the recently published LAM guidance in consequence. Reach out to Katharine Adlard if you have any questions.