Month: February 2018

The Pensions Regulator has got their first prosecution of a firm deliberately failing to provide workplace pensions for their staff.

The firm is Stotts Tours (Oldham) and both the firm and the Managing Director, Alan Stott will have to pay over £60,000 to The Pensions Regulator after they admitted they deliberately tried to avoid providing auto enrolment pensions to their workers. Which is against the Law.

The Judge said that Mr Stott had buried his head in the sand, and this later left him out of his depth.

There is lots of help and advice around for businesses on auto enrolment. At All Payrolls we can help you with the administrative and reporting functions of pensions and related payroll matters .

The Pensions Regulator  site also has lots of useful information on their website.

If you are in any doubt about this or any other aspect of payroll, pension administration and related matters please contact us , if we can help we will, if it is something we don’t deal with we can point you in the right direction.  We are a business and we have been through auto enrolment ourselves, we are happy to share our experience and we are always here to help.

During the year to 31 March 2017 HMRC received over 5,000 reports of suspected underpayments of National Minimum Wage, this is up from 2,513 the previous year.  Employers need to be aware that the Government has committed £25.3m for minimum wage enforcement in 2017/18 and launched an awareness campaign for workers.  If an employer is found to have been underpaying workers they face penalties of up to 200% of the arrears owed, up to £20k per worker.

According to tax investigations expert Paul Noble of Pinsent Masons, the increase in underpayment reports from whistleblowers to HMRC and Acas may be owing to the number of workers falling within the scope of the National Minimum Wage rising from 1m to 1.6m people, and the introduction of a new online complaints process which makes it easier for people to raise concerns.

The National Living Wage was introduced in 2016 and raised pay from £6.70 to £7.20 per hour, and then to £7.50 per hour last year for workers aged 25 or over.

If you are in any doubt about your responsibilities as an employer please contact us at All Payrolls.  We can help and advise you on all aspects of employing people.

The Pensions Regulator has started doing spot checks in the East Midlands to make sure employers are meeting their auto enrolment obligations.  The checks will highlight employers who have not taken the necessary steps to become or remain compliant.

The spot checks began in London, but this will be the first time checks have been done in the East Midlands.  Inspections have already been carried out in Sheffield, Birmingham and Greater Manchester at short-notice.

The Pensions Regulator also says that these checks will help them understand if employers are facing any unnecessary challenges that they can help them with, such as improving systems.

The Pensions Regulators Compliance and Enforcement bulletin showed that between July and September 2017 the Pensions Regulator issued a total of 5,479 fixed penalty notices and 1,433 escalating penalty notices.

At All Payrolls we can help you with the administrative and reporting functions in respect of auto enrolment.  Please contact us , we are happy to help.

We are delighted to announce that APCS, the organisation through whom All Payrolls processes our DBS checks, is now able to offer processing timescales for DBS Basic Disclosures the same day with some cases being returned in only a matter of minutes!

Customers have commented that these rapid turnaround times are speeding up recruitment times.

The online application has a question which asks Yes or No if the applicant is working in England or Wales and a question asking if the applicant wants his/her certificate to be sent to an alternative address. There is also a question on the identity checking page which asks which business or industry sector the applicant will be working in.

All Payrolls receives an electronic notification of the result of each Basic Disclosure and we forward these to the relevant contact on your account. The DSB continue to automatically forward the certificate to the applicant’s home address, but the applicant can now choose to have their disclosure certificate sent to a different address, such as an organisation’s address or a relative’s address.

For more information visit our DBS checks page or contact us.