Spouse Pension

[billridley]

I have conflicting views from my accountant and previous posts on here and wondered if anyone can give me further guidance please. My wife has minimal pension contributions whilst mine are relatively healthy. I makes sense to me to contribute into her pension fund (she is a non working director) and build up her allowance to the limit of the tax free income allowance, ie the amount above which she would be liable for income tax. My accountant said that this would be ok, but previous discussions on here suggest that if she is not receiving a salary remuneration, then she should not receive pension remuneration.
I thought that an additional benefit would be that in the event that at some stage I am deemed to be inside IR35, my pension contributions would mitigate any impact, would any pension paid to my wife have the same mitigation, or will the contributions just be taxed as my private income.
Any thoughts please ?

[Clare@InTouch]

I think there is the danger of the contributions being deemed not "wholly and exclusively for business purposes" if you put them through the company and the employee has no salary, the risk is then that they would be disallowed for CT purposes.

Pension contributions to an employee's pension would not be deducted from your IR35 deemed salary calculation, the same way that their salary (if they had one) would not be.

[billridley]

I misunderstood then about pension contributions. I thought I was mitigating any potential penalty. Have to rethink my strategy.