After Auto Enrolment Staging – What happens next?
Once you have completed the initial setup of auto enrolment you will need to complete a set of tasks on an ongoing basis. You will need to continually comply with their ongoing duties in order to avoid being fined by the Pensions regulator.
- Ongoing Assessment and Enrolment: All employees must be monitored on an ongoing basis to see if there are any changes to their worker category. For example, if an employee turns 22 or if their qualifying earnings increase then they may become an eligible jobholder. Even if this occurs after staging, you will still need to carry out a new Auto-Enrolment assessment duties for this individual employee. Ant employees that become eligible will need to be enrolled and an Auto-Enrolment communication letter must be issued to them.
- Record keeping: You must keep records of your Auto-Enrolment activities for six years. You must also keep any employee opt-out notices for a period of four years. By law, there are two different types of records that an employer must keep.
- Staff records- including names and addresses of employees that have been enrolled, records of when the contributions were paid to the pension scheme, any opt-out notices and much more
- Pension scheme records – including the pension scheme reference and scheme name and address.
- Pension Submission: your payroll software should work and support your auto enrolment pension scheme. Each pension provider requires their data files in a certain format. Check to see if your payroll allows for the easy transfer of data files to the pension scheme. Some providers such as NEST and Smart Pension offer a direct integration or an API facility between payroll and pension provider which will save you time each pay period.
- Paying contributions: You will need to pay the correct level of employee and employer contributions to the Auto-Enrolment pension scheme in a timely fashion. The contribution amounts will either be based on a fixed amount or a percentage of earnings. Your payroll software should easily calculate both fixed or percentage amounts for you.