Adviser services – what else we do

Please click on the topics below to find out what else we do:

Trustee Support Services are pleased to offer a range of services to financial and legal advisers and their clients. These services are detailed below, but please feel free to contact us if you wish to discuss any of these, or, indeed, if there is something else that you think we may be able to help with – if we can’t help directly, we may just know someone who can!

Trust registration

We can register trusts on HMRC’s Trust Registration Service (TRS) on behalf of the trustees for a fee of £200 + VAT per trust. Please see our step-by-step guide for our process for trust registration. We are happy to deal with you, as the adviser, your clients directly or a combination. Whilst this is predominantly an online service, we are available by phone or email to help resolves queries and issues at any stage.

If you, as the adviser, register as a user on our website, you can use your account to submit details for multiple trusts and all post-registration documents will be uploaded back into your account. If your trustee client registers as a user, all post-registration documentation will be uploaded into their account.

If trust documentation is provided, we will use this to cross-check the information provided in our Trustee Questionnaire. We will not register the trust until any anomalies have been resolved. If we identify any discrepancies or issues with the trust documentation, we are happy to highlight these and their implications. We can then work with you to help resolve any issues by providing deeds etc. We can also draft a report setting out how a particular trust may work and its tax implications etc.

This can be useful if, for example, the trustees are considering distributing assets to beneficiaries and, possibly, winding up the trust.Our fee for such a report will depend on the trust’s complexity and what it will cover, but we will provide the quote before starting work. Reports can be written for you to incorporate into your reports or for presentation directly to the trustees.

Once a trust is registered, we will help the trustees take over the government gateway account so that they can maintain the trust’s details on the Trust Register (and we provide instructions!). We are available to update the Trust Register on behalf of trustees, if required. Our fee for this is on a time-spent basis.

We are looking at how to offer similar trust registration services for overs trust registers, such as Ireland’s Central Register of the Beneficial Ownership of Trusts (CRBOT) – please contact us if this may be of interest.

 

Consultancy services

We are happy to work with you to provide bespoke technical and financial planning advice. This need not be confined to trust-related issues, we can cover a wide range of tax and financial planning issues including trusts, pensions, investments , life assurance and other financial products for both individual clients and small business owners etc.

We can also provide advice around specialist areas, such as the establishment of family investment companies and property trusts. Our services can be provided to you or to your clients directly, in the form of a report. We are happy to meet with you and your clients, either face-to-face or remotely via, say, Zoom or Teams.

We can provide documentation, such as deeds needed for the maintenance of trusts or to resolve existing issues in the current trust documentation. Such documents may include deeds of rectification, deeds of appointment and/or retirement of trustees, deeds of absolute appointment to beneficiaries (which can incorporate a deed of assignment for trusts holding investment bonds). All deeds we provide are bespoke and prepared for that particular trust and the cost of the deed will be advised before it is drawn up.

Training and development

We can develop bespoke training courses for you and/ or your colleagues in your practice covering most areas of tax and financial planning. These can be presented at your premises or remotely via Zoom or Teams.

We are also happy to speak at conferences, seminars, webinars or meetings held for your firm and/ or clients. We are regular speakers at industry events held by professional bodies and others.

Technical support

We can provide technical support around trusts, pensions, investments, life assurance and tax and financial planning. This support can be provided in the way that works best for you – either on an ad-hoc basis, where our fee would be based on the number of 15 minute units that a query takes, or on a more formal, structured basis – we are happy to discuss your requirements. Technical support can be provided by phone, email, remotely by Zoom or Teams or face-to-face.

 

Regular bulletins for clients and professional advisers

We produce a bulletin covering topical financial issues three times a year (February, June and October). We will also produce an additional bulletin, where relevant, following a significant event such as a Budget, general election or change in legislation.

Our bulletins are targeted at your clients and professional connections and are provided in Word without any branding. This allows you to add your branding, to top and tail the bulletin and to edit the content, if required. Each bulletin will generally run to 9 or 10 pages and typically cover around 20 different topics. You can view an extract from a bulletin which will give you an idea of the ‘look and feel’ of the bulletins.

We also produce an Estate Planning Bulletin twice a year dealing with inheritance tax and estate planning matters.

The cost of each bulletin gives a firm unlimited use of that bulletin with their clients and/ or professional connections. Please contact us if you would like more details or to be added to the mailing list so we can let you know each time a new bulletin becomes available.

 

The Death Benefit Trust

We have developed wording for The Death Benefit Trust. This is establishes a form of bypass trust, predominantly designed to accept pension death benefits or payments from a death in service scheme (although it can also accept other assets) that does not require to be registered on the Trust Registration Service until such a time that payments are made into it from, say a pension or death in service scheme.

We can provide bespoke wording for a particular situation for the consideration of the client’s legal advisers or we can provide a licence to give your firm unlimited use of our template for The Death Benefit Trust with your existing and prospective clients. Our template has been approved by Counsel. We will provide you with notes on how The Death Benefit Trust works.