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Payroll Clients Continue to Ignore Auto Enrolment

22nd Mar 2017
Brought to you by
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The payroll solution that provides all you need for Auto Enrolment.

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As of February 2017, an impressive seven million employees have already been put into an auto enrolment pension scheme. This represents over 340,000 employers that have complied with their duties.

However, non-compliance is very prevalent. Despite auto enrolment being in force since 2012 and numerous advertising campaigns from the Pensions Regulator (TPR), employers are still ignoring their AE duties. Some employers fail to realise that non-compliance could damage their credit rating which will subsequently affect their ability to get access to finance.

Shockingly, the number of Escalating Penalty Notices (EPNs) that have been issued by TPR has nearly doubled. Between October and December 2016, there were 870 EPNs issued and 2,919 Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued. Since auto enrolment began, there has been a total of 1,477 EPNs and 9,831 FPNs issued.

The Regulator states that a judge will not accept a ‘reasonable’ excuse except in very exceptional circumstances. To date, no employers have been able to show that they have had a reasonable excuse for failing to comply with their auto enrolment duties.

Auto enrolment (AE) is to affect 750,000 small and micro employers this year alone. TPR predicts that the number of penalties and fines will drastically increase as auto enrolment affects these SMEs. Smaller employers are more likely to leave their auto enrolment duties to the last minute, not leaving them enough time to prepare.

As a payroll bureau, make sure your clients understand what they need to do and their deadlines for doing so to fully comply with their employer duties. TPR will take action if an employer is willfully non-compliant.

Complying with AE - The Easy Way

BrightPay can make your auto enrolment journey easy. Once you enter your client's staging date in the payroll, BrightPay’s automation technology gets to work.

BrightPay will automatically assess the employees for you and inform you what worker category each employee falls into based on their age and qualifying earnings. From there you can batch enrol all eligible jobholders into the chosen pension scheme. BrightPay will then automatically produce all the AE communications based the employees worker category. This all takes just a few minutes. No need to run any reports - it’s all automated.

Read more on BrightPay’s testimonials page.

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