The comment about TUPE being business as usual and should not cause problems is extremely well made for me, as is the complaint that IT causes problems too. Recently, I TUPE'd 130 staff and despite telling HMRC that this was happening, they still managed to "start" in the new company before "finishing" the old. Problems with the HMRC-approved payroll software (it took the provider 4 months to accept responsibility for the problems) only added to the confusion. Consequently, each member of staff was given a BR code and there was nothing the company could do to fix it, so it was left to the workforce to advise HMRC of it's error. Since the majority of the weekly paid direct labour force were not English speaking in any respect, it took several weeks, lots of phone calls, plenty of translations by a "trusted person" and lots of advances of pay to fix.
I've had an instance where staff were moved from company to company under TUPE. HMRC's systems couldn't recognise this over a period of more than a month and started spewing out BR codes as it assumed that they all had two jobs! This was made more complicated because 75% of these staff were Polish-only speakers and of course HMRC won't talk to anyone else than the taxpayer for reasons of confidentiality. Eventually it was resolved but not without a huge amount of confusion.
The next complication was that there was a glitch in the HMRC-approved payroll software as the FPS figures were wrong. The software company were at fault, but they hid behind the HMRC approval by saying "not us, must be you or HMRC" and it even became a challenge to get the software company to tell us how to get hold of the file that was submitted to HMRC so that checks could be made. Eventually, after several months, it was proved to be the software company and it was resolved.
My answers
The comment about TUPE being business as usual and should not cause problems is extremely well made for me, as is the complaint that IT causes problems too. Recently, I TUPE'd 130 staff and despite telling HMRC that this was happening, they still managed to "start" in the new company before "finishing" the old. Problems with the HMRC-approved payroll software (it took the provider 4 months to accept responsibility for the problems) only added to the confusion. Consequently, each member of staff was given a BR code and there was nothing the company could do to fix it, so it was left to the workforce to advise HMRC of it's error. Since the majority of the weekly paid direct labour force were not English speaking in any respect, it took several weeks, lots of phone calls, plenty of translations by a "trusted person" and lots of advances of pay to fix.
I've had an instance where staff were moved from company to company under TUPE. HMRC's systems couldn't recognise this over a period of more than a month and started spewing out BR codes as it assumed that they all had two jobs! This was made more complicated because 75% of these staff were Polish-only speakers and of course HMRC won't talk to anyone else than the taxpayer for reasons of confidentiality. Eventually it was resolved but not without a huge amount of confusion.
The next complication was that there was a glitch in the HMRC-approved payroll software as the FPS figures were wrong. The software company were at fault, but they hid behind the HMRC approval by saying "not us, must be you or HMRC" and it even became a challenge to get the software company to tell us how to get hold of the file that was submitted to HMRC so that checks could be made. Eventually, after several months, it was proved to be the software company and it was resolved.