REITs in ISAs - FreeTrade withholding tax reclaim notifications?

Hello,
I did try to search for this topic before posting but didn’t find anything related that wasn’t locked.

For REITs that you have in your ISA, it states “PIDs paid by UK REITs are subject to a 20% withholding tax… FreeTrade will reclaim the withholding tax and distribute to ISA holders approx 30-60 days after the PID is paid”.

My question is, does anyone know whether FT will notify you when they do repay you and will it appear in your Activity listing? I hope so as it will be rather difficult to keep track of if the only thing that happens is it being added to your balance.

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They do notify you as a message but it is not something that appears in your activity feed. Hopefully something that will change in the future as you’re right, without your own spreadsheet it is a nightmare to keep track of.

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Hi
Thank you so much for your answer. I actually made the assumption since I hadn’t got any replies that people didn’t know and therefore I went to FreeTrade support. Here is their reply:

Unfortunately we do not update when we have collected this payment i’m afraid and I’m also sorry to confirm that we do have a known system limitation currently where manual payments/transfers are not reflected under the Activity tab in-app. Sadly this does include all Corporate Actions events, Standing Orders Deposits and any other manual allocation of cash by Operations team.

However, to counter this, we can generate an Activity statement on an ad hoc basis with a running cash balance to confirm that dividends have been applied to your account.

We’ll just need your date of birth for this when you require a statement generated and please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with!

Not great but we are where we are.

I did request a balance statement from 1 November 2022 to 1 January 2023 and it was a very well laid out statement and is very useful, however, I did not see any tax reclaim transactions in there. Therefore I will have a look at the January statement in February and if they do not appear there, then it will be well over 60 days for some of them and I will raise another support ticket. Hopefully this will resolve itself one way or another.

Can take a little longer than 60 days, I asked about the tax on a PID in October and got this;

We do monthly reclaims of 6th of the month to the 5th of the next month. For any dividends received from the 6th of October to 5th of November, we madea claim on the 6th of December. HMRC will refund us by 17th of the next month - January. We will then distribute refund by end of that same month - January, so this should reach your account soon.

Hope this helps

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Thanks Rob, yes it helps a great deal. Perhaps FreeTrade ought to write that claims can take up to 90 days rather than “30-60”.

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Just in the process of shutting down my Gia REIT positions and rebuying in my ISA. Will now keep an eye on this. As mentioned above, the transfers of cash between the two accounts doesn’t show either - both things together make it difficult to keep track.

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Hey mate,

Any update on this? Did you get the withholding tax paid back in the end, as I’m in the same situation.

Tried contacting support and got -

“ We will notify you as soon as any due payments are made into your account. Thanks for your patience.

Let me know if there’s anything else

I can help with in the meantime. “

Not very helpful.

Hello,

I did have a bit of an exchange with FreeTrade support which clarified things but I did feed back to them that it could be clearer in the app. I forgot to add it to this thread so thank you for the reminder. Here is the convo:

FT:
"Distributions typically run from 6th of the first month to the 5th of the next.
HMRC typically issues refunds by the 17th of the month that follows the end of the reclaim period. Therefore we are expecting to receive the refund for this on 17th February. Once we have the funds we will distribute them to customers as soon as possible."

Me:
“Yes, that makes sense thanks. Although it may be a good idea to make it clearer in the app where it says “30-60” days as to me it reads that this will be 30 to 60 days after the original payment, whereas it actually seems to be saying 30 to 60 days after FreeTrade claims it. Re-wording would probably help to manage expectations on the parts of users.”

FT
“Thanks for your feedback on this - that’s really helpful and we’ll relay this to the wider team so that we can improve this in future.”