A limited company client that I do the payroll for has received a letter from the Pensions Regulator about their automatic enrolment duties.
The company has 2 directors, both of which are on the payroll.
Neither have any formal employment contract.
Both directors earn under £10,000 p/a.
There are no other staff.
Are they caught by automatic enrolment? I didn't think they would be. I have tried looking into this online, before asking on here, but it's just confused me all the more!
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Ist quiet simple. See here
https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/en/business-advisers/automatic-e...
Perhaps they havent completed their compliance declaration.
Its quiet simple. See here
https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/en/business-advisers/automatic-e...
Perhaps they havent completed their compliance declaration.
Indeed ... but even simpler (as per link provided):
".. an organisation with one or more directors who do not have contracts of employment is not an employer if it does not have any staff other than the director(s).
The company will have no automatic enrolment duties and does not need to complete a declaration of compliance.
In this case they should let us know that they're not an employer."
If you don't tell TPR (who get raw figures about PAYE schemes from HMRC) then how are they supposed to know?
Many thanks for the replies. I wouldn't have wanted to say that they had no automatic enrolment duties, when the Pensions Regulator believed that they had. Things are never simple though...now when I try to declare online that they are not an employer, the Pensions Regulator's website is saying there is a mismatch between the letter code and PAYE reference! I've triple checked this, and of course there isn't a mismatch! What is it with government websites??!!! I've got better things to do than to waste my time with this, or be on hold to the Pensions Regulator forever due to "a high volume of calls..."
Having now spoken to the Pensions Regulator, they confirmed that the client is already down as 'not' being an employer, so effectively the letter was sent out in error. Unbelievable!
Ah, so yet another example of what happens when 'nudge letters' are allowed to proliferate without the equivalent of contraception (i.e. intelligent filtering).
It's a shame if that approach has now spread to TPR (who used to be rather good at selective targeting), but the lack of effort for the issuer (and the hidden nature of the pain suffered by others) encourages random usage by public bodies.