The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has handed out the first penalties for auto-enrolment failures. The first penalties issued in the latest quarterly report revealed that TPR has issued its first three fixed penalty fines of £400, between July and September and also issued 163 compliance notices (these give employers a deadline by which they need to remedy one or more breaches of the automatic enrolment requirements) in this period.
The TPR’s report also highlighted the main errors that employers are making, which are:
• Registering for a Government Gateway ID and assuming that is sufficient. As well as doing this employers need to complete a declaration of compliance within five months of reaching the staging date, e.g if your staging date is 1 December 2914, you must submit your declaration by no later than 30 April 2015. So start your declaration of compliance as soon as possible after your staging date. Adding the required information as it becomes available will help make sure you don’t miss your deadline.
• Being unaware that, despite running two PAYE schemes (e.g. one for most workers and one for directors), an employer only has one staging date. An employer’s staging date us based on the number of employees in their largest PAYE scheme, and all eligible employees in all schemes need to be enrolled by that date.
• Completing a declaration of compliance without choosing a pension provider. Don’t assume that your payroll software will handle all the necessary auto-enrolment requirements, you still need to choose a pension scheme
• Omitting self-employed workers who have a contract to provide the work personally and are not in business on their own account. As with the entitlement to holiday pay, these individuals are workers for auto-enrolment purposes and must be enrolled like employees.
Source: Tips & Advice and www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk