You might also be interested in
Replies (7)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
RTI
I am not sure RTI will work.. Too much too soon.. You cannot expect small business's to send in weekly reports.. What about holidays, sickness, computer malfunctions..
to add to remarks made by adogett..
What about snow, powercuts, people who don't want to be forced to file by internet, rural areas with no broadband coverage, good fridays, bank holidays, Saturdays, Sundays, etcetera etcetera?
Holidays
Yup , I'm starting RTI with a few days off on leave ( school holidays not strop!). Cover arranged and "trained" but very nervous of making mistakes which will be hard to unwind so returns unlikely to go in before I get back to work. Not a great start to be hoping system seizes up in the first few days despite HMRC confidence, nor to be delaying my own payroll processing, until I return.
Why Weekly?
Would it not be better if filing were monthly as per the last minute concession for small employers until 5 October 2013? I cannot see how HMRC will receive weekly information and pass it to the benefits office for them to amend benefits before the next weekly payroll is run. They will be permanently behind the curve. Far better to have one monthly filing as we do on CIS and give employers a sporting chance of complying.
Not that worried
I am not that worried about the impact of RTI on my client base. This is because I am confident the overload of data will bring HMRC to its knees. The pilot:
1. Does not, and cannot, test the volume impact on the poorest quality HMRC staff.
2. Is a self-selecting sample for large and small companies alike.
I'll explain what I meant in point 2 with reference to a previous job where accurate payroll processing for nearly 1,000 staff came under me. When the company was restructuiring this was a pain in the [***] with the sorts of data integrity issues mentioned in the main post. Other years it was nice as pie with only the occasional hassle over bonus payments and the like.
Now suppose you were me and HMRC invited me to sign up to the pilot.
1. Do I sign up in a restructure year? NO WAY I have enough on my plate as it is!
2. In another year? Yes probably. I get an early look at the system and so does my IT department, so when go live day comes around life carries on being nice as pie.
Up and down the country people like me will have self-selected a very favourble data set on to the pilot.
RTI - BASDA comment from Alex Rowson, Chair of HR & Payroll SIG
Notwithstanding the fact that pilot employer’s have hand-picked themselves and are therefore more likely to have ‘clean’ data, HMRC have said that with nearly 6 million employees being submitted on a regular basis through RTI the level of mismatches and manual reconciliations required is at a 13 month low.
The main advantage of RTI is that rather than have a single end-of-year reconciliation process, mismatches will be picked up as and when an employee is added to an employer’s database and their details submitted when they are first paid, and there have already been many instances of incorrect NI numbers that have been used for years being corrected as a result of NINO verifications being performed on every employees’ FPS submission.
There will of course be a spike during April when the majority of employers first start to file RTI, but this will be no different to the volume of mismatches HMRC will see when the 2012-2013 end-of-year filing reconciliation is performed in May.
Hopefully employers will have cleaned their data before submitting their 2012-2013 end of year returns.