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We have a payroll bureau as part of our practice.  Talking to clients and contacts, and reading the various articles which come out on at least a daily basis, even if some are over-hyped, it does seem to be the case that there will come a point where NEST will be the only option for auto enrolment.  This leads me to two questions for readers:

1.  Am I right in thinking that NEST will not deal with the communication to workers which is required?

2.  If this is correct, does anyone have any thoughts on how they / their clients will deal with communications?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

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By Steve B LPAES
27th Sep 2013 10:02

Auto enrolment

Jennifer,

We deal with Auto Enrolment for a number of customers as we specialise in this area. We have also had a number of conversations with NEST (and many other providers) about the services that they will supply and more importantly what they will not supply. This has helped us to understand their requirements from their potential clients over the next four years and beyond.

NEST will offer guidance on your employee comms but will stop short of dealing with the whole exercise for you. They are also unable to help with the assessment process and the recording of communications and activity in line with the regulator expectations.Other providers adopt a similar attitude where a few will do more and go as far as to post out letters/send emails on your behalf. I would suggest that as we move on through the AE timetable this hightened level of support will be rare if not extinct.

In the second quarter of next year nearly 12,000 companies a month will be staging... in the following year you will see that peak at nearly 60,000 businesses each month and then towards the end of the governments timetable that number rises to a maximum of 137,000 business each month. That means 400 a day...then 2000 each day and finally 4500 each day.

Without automation these activity levels will be difficult to manage by any provider.

We offer a service that automatically distils your payroll data down to the bare essentials to make AE work (this will match your chosen pension providers requirements) and then passing on clean data will be the best way to start to make that process easier and manageable, for all concerned. This will mean that we can provide a template for communication for each stage of your process and category of your workforce, allowing you to send this information out in the most effective way possible (letter, email, hand, payslip etc).

We also offer our clients employees' access to a telephony service so that they can call a real person after reading any of these communications and ask simple non advice questions on what to do next. All of these calls and communications are recorded and saved for the requisite six years so that when the regulator comes knocking on your door to check that you have met your obligations under the legislation you will have a real time record of every conversation and letter issued saved in each employees name, whether they are still employed or have left your employment.

We are also working with a number of payroll bureau's and indeed IFA's who white label our service for there clients in order to facilitate an outsourced AE compliance service. We would be interested to hear form any other companies/payroll bureau's providing a similar service and their experiences (good and bad!) as there is a lot of work to be done out there over the next 4 years,

1.2 million businesses need to go through this process and we are only at the very start right now!  

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