Re: AVC tax change
The Revenue change, as far as I understand it, is that you can no longer "front load" your AVC's within the year, i.e. you can contribute only up to the Revenue limit allowed as the year progresses. This happened me last year when I was stopped from putting a bonus, received in March, into AVC's. I had no problem doing this in 2004 but the Revenue tightened up the rules and I think that our payroll software was updated to reflect this. If it had been allowed, then I would have breached the revenue limit as it had accumulated up to that point in time, though not within the year as a whole - when viewed from the year-end perspective. To get around the problem, I simply re-structured the AVC contributions so that they cumulatively never exceeded the 30% limit (my age group) of total income earned up to that point in time within the tax year. It is still true that if, at year end, you have not yet reached your limit, you can top it up (to the limit) from bonuses, etc. Based on this experience, it seems that your HR person is mistaken. I know that when this issue arose in our company, our accounts/payroll people sought and received clarification from the Revenue.