I paid no UK tax when I moved my pension. Do I still have to report it to the IRS?

Almost certainly, if a reporting threshold was met. A recognised transfer between UK registered pension schemes is an authorised member payment and produces no HMRC charge, but FinCEN Form 114 and Form 8938 are not tests of taxable events. They are tests of accounts and assets. The absence of a UK tax charge tells you nothing about whether the ceding and receiving accounts had to be reported for that calendar year.

Do I report both the old and the new pension on the same FBAR?

Normally yes. FinCEN requires each account to be valued separately at a reasonable approximation of its greatest value during the calendar year, and an account closed mid-year is still an account that existed in that year. So the ceding plan is reported at its maximum before the transfer, and the receiving plan at its own maximum afterwards. The form has no mechanism for netting a transfer between two reportable accounts.

Does reporting both accounts overstate what I actually own?

On the face of the form, yes, and that is expected. The FBAR reports account maximums, not net worth, and the aggregate threshold test adds those maximums together. A single pension pot moved once in a year can therefore appear twice in the aggregate. Omitting the closed account to make the total look right creates a defect that is easy to spot, because the receiving account then has no visible source.

The old provider closed my plan and I cannot log in. How do I find the maximum value?

Work through the surviving evidence. The transfer-out or discharge statement is best, corroborated by the receiving scheme's transfer-in credit. Failing that, use the last annual or 5 April statement before the transfer, any transfer value statement, or the adviser file. A right of access request under UK data protection law obliges the provider to supply the personal data it still holds. Record the source and the exchange rate used.

What if only part of my pension transferred?

Then more than two accounts may be reportable. The usual case leaves the original plan open with a reduced balance, giving two accounts for the year. Where the ceding provider cannot vary the original contract and reissues the retained benefits under a new plan number, the calendar year contains three plan numbers and three separate maximum values for one pot of money. Each one is reported on its own line.

Missed Reporting a Transferred UK Pension: FBAR Fix

Q: Does the closed pension go on Form 8938 if its year-end value is nil?

Where Form 8938 is required for that year, the closed plan is an asset that existed during the tax year and was disposed of in it, and the form carries questions asking exactly that. An interest in a foreign pension plan is reported in Part VI, the assets held inside the plan are not separately reported, and conversion uses the exchange rate for the last day of the tax year even though the asset was disposed of earlier.

Missed Reporting a Transferred UK Pension almost always begins with one perfectly reasonable inference: HMRC treated the move as a non-event, so the United States must have done the same. It did not. When a US person consolidates a personal pension into a SIPP, or shifts a defined contribution pot from one platform to another, two separate foreign financial accounts existed during that calendar year. Each had its own provider, its own account number and its own maximum value, and on FinCEN Form 114 both are normally reportable for that year even though only one pot of money ever existed. The transfer year is the year clients miss, precisely because it is the year in which nothing appeared to happen.

This article deals only with transfers between UK registered pension schemes. Transfers to an overseas scheme are a different problem with a different rulebook and are deliberately out of scope here. What follows is the reporting and remediation position we work through when a client tells us, usually in passing and usually years later, that they tidied up their pensions.

Why does a UK-to-UK transfer leave no trace on the UK side?

A move between two UK registered pension schemes is a recognised transfer, and a recognised transfer is an authorised member payment. HMRC sets out the essential principles at https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/pensions-tax-manual/ptm100010, which describes a transfer as the movement of an individual's pension rights from one scheme to another and confirms that, as long as the transfer is a recognised transfer, it is an authorised payment. The same manual page imposes a condition that matters a great deal later in this article: the transfer must be made direct to the receiving registered pension scheme, and a transferring administrator who gets that wrong can face a penalty of up to 3,000 pounds.

The consequence of falling outside that definition is severe on the UK side. HMRC's guidance for members and administrators at https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/pensions-tax-manual/ptm101000 is blunt: if the payment is not a recognised transfer, or a transfer to the Pension Protection Fund or the Financial Assistance Scheme, it is an unauthorised payment and the member will be liable to tax on the amount transferred. The consumer-facing version at https://www.gov.uk/transferring-your-pension/transferring-to-a-uk-pension-scheme says the same thing in plainer language and adds the practical warnings about losing scheme-specific lump sum rights and protections.

So a properly executed UK-to-UK transfer generates no tax charge, no entry on a self assessment return, no P60 and no correspondence from HMRC. Nothing arrives in the post that looks like a tax document. In the files we remediate, that silence is what does the damage. The client files a UK return that says nothing about the transfer, concludes there is nothing to say about it anywhere, and the US forms go out for that year describing a single pension that no longer exists.

Missed Reporting a Transferred UK Pension: what changes in the transfer year

The US reporting tests are not tests of taxable events. They are tests of accounts and assets. That distinction is the whole of the problem, because a transfer year changes the account picture completely while changing the tax picture not at all. Here is what actually changes:

A new account number comes into existence at the receiving scheme, with a different provider name and a different provider address.
The ceding account is closed, usually within weeks of the final payment, and online access to it is normally withdrawn shortly afterwards.
Two sets of statements exist for the year, neither of which covers the full twelve months.
The fund lineup changes, often from a small insured range to open-architecture collectives on a platform.
Where the transfer was partial, a residual pot stays behind, and some providers reissue the retained benefits under a fresh plan number.
Where a defined benefit entitlement was given up, a cash figure is attached to it for the first time.

None of that is visible to HMRC in any way that produces paperwork. All of it is visible to FinCEN Form 114 and to Form 8938.

Do both the old and the new pension go on the FBAR?

In the normal case, yes. The FBAR is required where the aggregate value of foreign financial accounts exceeded 10,000 US dollars at any time during the calendar year, as the IRS sets out at https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/report-of-foreign-bank-and-financial-accounts-fbar. It is due on 15 April with an automatic extension to 15 October, and it is filed electronically through FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System. Nothing in that test asks whether an account was open on 31 December, and nothing asks whether the money in it came from somewhere else.

People sometimes reach for the retirement plan exception. It does not help here. The exception in 31 CFR 1010.350(g) covers participants and beneficiaries in plans under sections 401(a), 403(a) and 403(b), and owners and beneficiaries of individual retirement accounts under section 408 and Roth IRAs under section 408A. Those are US vehicles. A UK registered pension scheme, whether a stakeholder plan, a group personal pension or a SIPP, sits outside that exception, and the account-based FBAR analysis applies to it in the ordinary way.

FinCEN's own guidance on valuation, at https://www.fincen.gov/reporting-maximum-account-value, then does the rest of the work. Maximum account value is a reasonable approximation of the greatest value of currency or nonmonetary assets in the account during the calendar year. Periodic account statements may be relied on provided they fairly reflect that maximum. Each account must be valued separately. Amounts are recorded in US dollars rounded up to the next whole dollar, a negative result is entered as zero, and conversion uses the Treasury rate for the last day of the calendar year, published at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/treasury-reporting-rates-exchange/treasury-reporting-rates-of-exchange. Read that against a transfer: the ceding account's greatest value during the year was the balance in the days before it emptied, and the receiving account's greatest value was some later point after the money arrived. Both are real. Both belong on the form.

Is reporting both accounts double counting the same money?

It looks like it and it is not. The FBAR does not report net worth. It reports accounts, and it asks for each account's own maximum during the calendar year. There is no netting box, no transfer-in adjustment and no mechanism anywhere on the form for saying that the 180,000 pounds in Part II item one is the same 180,000 pounds as in Part II item two. The aggregate threshold test works the same way, by adding the maximum values of every reportable account, which is why a person whose entire foreign wealth is a single pension can cross the threshold twice over in a consolidation year.

The failure mode we see most often is a client, or a previous preparer, quietly deciding that this cannot be right and reporting only the surviving account. That produces an FBAR which is wrong in a way that is easy to spot: a pension account opened in August with a maximum value of 200,000 pounds, and no account anywhere on the form from which that money could have come. We would far rather explain an apparently doubled aggregate than explain a missing account.

How do you evidence a maximum value when the old provider has closed the account?

This is the practical heart of a transfer-year catch-up, and it is the part no general guide covers. By the time a client comes to us, the ceding provider has typically closed the plan, removed it from the online portal and stopped issuing statements. The standard is not perfection. FinCEN asks for a reasonable approximation of the greatest value during the calendar year, and permits reliance on periodic statements that fairly reflect it. Our job is to build that approximation from what survives, in this order of preference:

The transfer-out or discharge statement from the ceding provider, which states the amount paid away and the date, and is the single most useful document in the file.
The receiving scheme's transfer-in credit, shown on the new plan's first statement or transaction history, which corroborates the same figure from the other side.
The ceding provider's last annual statement or 5 April statement before the transfer, read together with any contributions paid between that date and the transfer.
A statement of entitlement or cash equivalent transfer value, where one was issued, which carries its own calculation date.
Correspondence and illustrations produced during the transfer process, including any adviser suitability report, which usually restates the value.
A right of access request to the ceding provider under UK data protection law, which obliges the organisation to supply the personal data it still holds; the framework is explained at https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/your-right-to-get-copies-of-your-data/.
The GOV.UK Pension Tracing Service at https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details, where the provider itself has been lost through a merger or rebrand; it gives contact details, not values.

FinCEN does allow a filer who cannot determine a value to complete the relevant part and check the amount unknown box. We treat that as a genuine last resort rather than a shortcut. A checked unknown box on a pension account, filed years late, invites exactly the question you do not want asked, and in our experience the figure is nearly always recoverable from one of the routes above. Whichever route produces the number, we write a short memo to the file recording the source document, the date, the sterling figure and the Treasury rate applied. If the year is ever examined, that memo is the difference between a defensible approximation and a guess.

What if only part of the pot moved? The three-account year

Partial transfers are common, usually because a slice of the old contract carries a guaranteed annuity rate, a protected tax-free cash entitlement or a with-profits element that the member is advised to keep. The client's mental model is that one pension became one and a half. The reporting model can be quite different.

In the straightforward version, the original plan number survives with a reduced balance and there are two accounts for the year: the original, with a maximum measured before the partial payment away, and the new SIPP. In the version that catches people out, the ceding provider cannot partially vary the original contract and instead reissues the retained benefits under a fresh plan number. That single calendar year now contains three account numbers, three separate maximum values and three lines on Part II of the FBAR, all of them describing one pot of pension money that never left the UK registered pension system.

Here is an illustration, and the figures are illustrative only. Assume a personal pension worth 300,000 pounds in February. In June, 200,000 pounds transfers to a new SIPP and the provider reissues the retained 100,000 pounds under a new plan number. The FBAR for that year reports the original plan at a maximum of 300,000 pounds, the reissued residual plan at its own maximum from June onwards, and the SIPP at its own maximum after the credit. Converted at the Treasury rate for 31 December, the aggregate on the face of the form is far larger than the client's actual pension wealth. That is the form working as designed, and it is not a reason to leave an account off.

Does Form 8938 need the pension that closed?

Form 8938 is a different form with a different architecture, and it is not satisfied by an FBAR. The thresholds for a specified individual living abroad are far higher: more than 200,000 dollars on the last day of the tax year or more than 300,000 at any time during it for an unmarried filer, and 400,000 or 600,000 for a married couple filing jointly. The instructions are at https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8938, and the IRS comparison of the two regimes is at https://www.irs.gov/businesses/comparison-of-form-8938-and-fbar-requirements.

An interest in a foreign pension plan is reported in Part VI of the form, and the instructions say to report the interest in the plan and not to separately report the assets held by the plan. Valuation follows a cascade: the fair market value of the beneficial interest on the last day of the tax year, and where that is not known and not readily accessible, the value of the cash and other property distributed during the year, and where there were no distributions, zero. The form asks, at Part VI line 33 and in the Part II summary question, whether the asset was acquired or disposed of during the tax year. Part V carries the equivalent question at line 22 for a deposit or custodial account opened or closed in the year.

So the closed plan does not simply vanish. Where Form 8938 is required for the year, the ceding plan is an asset that existed during the tax year and was disposed of in it, and the acquisition and disposition questions exist precisely so that the form can carry an asset whose year-end value is nil. The instructions also require the maximum value during the tax year of each specified foreign financial asset reported, and they require conversion at the exchange rate on the last day of the tax year even where the asset was disposed of before that date. The penalties are worth knowing before deciding to skip a line: 10,000 dollars for a failure to file, a further 10,000 dollars for each 30-day period beginning 90 days after an IRS notice up to a 50,000 dollar maximum, and a limitation period that stays open until three years after the form is actually filed.

Is a UK-to-UK transfer a US taxable distribution?

This needs care, and the honest answer is that it is fact-specific. The starting point is Article 18(1) of the US-UK income tax convention, which provides that income earned by a pension scheme is taxed as the individual's income only when, and to the extent that, it is paid to or for the benefit of that individual from the pension scheme, and it carries a parenthetical excluding amounts transferred to another pension scheme. That parenthetical is the textual hook for treating a scheme-to-scheme transfer as something other than a payment out.

It is not the end of the analysis. The IRS Office of Chief Counsel addressed UK pension rollovers in memorandum AM2008-009, published at https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-counsel/am2008009.pdf, and concluded that nothing in Article 18(1) overrides the requirement that a distribution qualify as an eligible rollover distribution within the meaning of section 402(c)(4). The practical formulation that follows is that a transfer is respected as a rollover only where it satisfies the rollover requirements under the domestic law of both the transferring and the receiving scheme.

That is why the mechanics of the transfer matter so much, and why we ask for the discharge paperwork rather than taking the client's description at face value. A direct provider-to-provider recognised transfer, made in the manner PTM100010 requires, with the money never passing through the member's own bank account, is the fact pattern the parenthetical in Article 18(1) most naturally describes. A payment that lands in the member's current account and is then paid into a new plan is a different fact pattern, will normally be an unauthorised payment on the UK side under PTM101000 with tax on the amount transferred, and cannot be presented to the IRS as a clean scheme-to-scheme transfer. The saving clause in Article 1(4) also has to be worked through, because it reserves each country's right to tax its own citizens, subject to the carve-outs in Article 1(5) that preserve Article 18(1). We would rather document all of this in the file at the time than reconstruct it under examination, and where a treaty position is being taken, Form 8833 belongs in the conversation.

What about a defined benefit to defined contribution transfer?

A DB to DC transfer changes the reporting position more than any other kind, because before the transfer there was a promise and after it there is an account. A deferred final salary entitlement has no daily balance, no fund value and nothing that behaves like an account. In the transfer year, a cash equivalent transfer value is calculated, a statement of entitlement is issued with its own calculation date, and a single very large number attaches itself to something that previously had no number at all.

On the UK side the process is regulated. Section 48 of the Pension Schemes Act 2015, at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/8/section/48, requires trustees or managers to check that appropriate independent advice has been taken before safeguarded benefits are transferred, converted or taken as an uncrystallised funds lump sum, with a value threshold set in regulations. That advice file, and the transfer value statement, are the documents we want, because the transfer value is what capitalises the new DC account.

The US consequence is that a filer who was comfortably below the Form 8938 thresholds for years can cross them in the transfer year without receiving a penny. A six-figure CETV landing in a SIPP is a specified foreign financial asset with a real year-end fair market value. It is the single most common reason we see a first-ever Form 8938 obligation arise in a year the client remembers as uneventful.

Do PFIC rules bite on the funds in the new SIPP?

Consolidation usually widens the investment menu. A legacy insured personal pension might have offered a dozen unitised funds. An open-architecture SIPP offers UK open-ended investment companies, unit trusts, investment trusts and exchange traded funds, most of which are non-US pooled vehicles and many of which meet the passive foreign investment company tests set out in the Form 8621 instructions at https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8621.

Two features of those instructions matter in a pension context. There is a de minimis rule that relieves Part I where the aggregate value of PFIC stock is 25,000 dollars or less on the last day of the tax year, 50,000 for joint filers, absent excess distributions or recognised gains. More importantly, the instructions recognise an exception for a shareholder who is a member or beneficiary of an arrangement treated as a foreign pension fund under a US income tax treaty, subject to the conditions in Regulations section 1.1298-1(c)(4). That is why holdings inside a UK registered pension scheme are usually analysed very differently from the same funds held personally. It also explains a trap: platform consolidations frequently pair a new SIPP with a general investment account on the same login, and a general investment account is not a pension. Funds held there get no pension analysis at all.

How do we fix the missed years?

There are three components, and a transfer-year catch-up usually needs at least two of them. The first is the FBARs. Late FinCEN Form 114 filings are made through the BSA E-Filing System, and a report filed after the deadline requires the filer to select a reason for filing late from a drop-down; FinCEN's guidance is that where none of the listed selections explains the position, the filer selects other and provides a written explanation in the text box. One point of housekeeping matters here: the IRS withdrew its standalone delinquent FBAR page during 2026 and the URL now returns a 404, so it should not be cited or relied on as a live named route. The statutory filing channel is unchanged.

The second component is the income tax returns. Where returns were filed but omitted Form 8938 or reported the pension position incorrectly, amended returns carry the correction. Where returns were not filed at all, late returns are prepared for the relevant years with the foreign tax credit and treaty positions worked through properly rather than assumed.

The third component, where the facts support it, is the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures, described by the IRS at https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/u-s-taxpayers-residing-outside-the-united-states. The non-residency requirement asks, for a US citizen or lawful permanent resident, that in one or more of the last three years for which the return due date has passed the individual had no US abode and was physically outside the United States for at least 330 full days. The submission comprises delinquent or amended returns for the most recent three years for which the due date has passed, delinquent FBARs for the most recent six years, and Form 14653 certifying that the failures resulted from non-willful conduct. A taxpayer who qualifies and complies is not subject to failure-to-file, failure-to-pay, accuracy-related, information return or FBAR penalties, and a filer without a Social Security number or ITIN must submit an ITIN application with the package.

The certification narrative is where transfer-year cases are won or lost. A statement that simply says the client did not know about the FBAR is weak. A statement that explains that the pension was moved between two UK registered schemes, that the move produced no UK tax charge, no self assessment entry and no tax paperwork, and that the client reasonably but wrongly inferred that a non-event for HMRC was a non-event for the United States, is specific, checkable and consistent with the documents in the file. It also has to be consistent with the FBARs being filed, which is another reason the account-level evidence work comes first.

What we ask for before we file a transfer year

A transfer-year package is a documentation exercise before it is a filing exercise. The list below is what we request at the outset, and gathering it is usually the longest part of the job:

The full name and registered address of both the ceding and the receiving provider, as they appear on the statements, for the Part II account entries.
Every plan, policy or account number in use during the calendar year, including any number reissued on a partial transfer.
The transfer-out or discharge statement, and the receiving scheme's transfer-in confirmation.
Statements covering the highest point of each account during the year, not just the year-end position.
The statement of entitlement or cash equivalent transfer value where a defined benefit entitlement was given up, together with the section 48 advice file.
Confirmation of how the money moved, specifically whether it passed directly between providers or through the member's own bank account.
A holdings schedule for the receiving plan, and separately for any general investment account opened alongside it.
Copies of any US returns already filed for the affected years, so that the correction route can be chosen rather than guessed at.

Reporting a transferred UK pension correctly is not difficult once the accounts are laid out on a timeline. What makes it hard is that the transfer itself is designed to be frictionless, so there is nothing in the client's UK paperwork that prompts the question. If you moved a pension between UK providers in a year that has already been filed, the two things worth checking today are whether the ceding account appears anywhere on that year's FBAR, and whether any plan number was reissued in the process. Those two checks catch the overwhelming majority of the missed years we see.