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Category: Industry News

15 February 2018

Auto Enrolment doesn’t end with your Declaration of Compliance

Implementing a workplace pension is not the end of compliance. So you’ve assessed your staff, put them into a workplace pension scheme, paid your contributions and declared your compliance. That’s not the end!  You still have legal duties that need to be completed, auto-enrolment is an ongoing responsibility. It is NOT a one-off exercise.

Every time you run your payroll you should be assessing your staff. You need to check who should be enrolled in the pension scheme and work out how much to pay in.  If you took on any new employees who are eligible for auto-enrolment, these workers need to be enrolled too.  You also have to manage the opt-outs and requests to opt-in and maintain records.

Re-enrolment takes place every three years and eligible staff who previously opted-out or left the scheme must be put back into it and a re-declaration of compliance must be completed to confirm what you have done about re-enrollment to the Pensions Regulator.

Failure to comply with your ongoing duties will lead to a fine, so if you need help with your new pension responsibilities, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us

6 February 2018

Now: Pensions has been fined £70,000

The trustee of master trust Now: Pensions has been fined £70,000. They have also been given a set of stringent deadlines to fix long-running pension scheme issues. This was announced by the Pensions Regulator (tPR) today.

Their CEO maintains that they “remain very much open for business”. However, in July 2017 NOW: Pensions voluntarily removed themselves from the Master Trust Assurance list for Auto Enrolment providers. This was after a discussion with tPR surrounding its historic contribution issues.

Read more about the Now: Pensions being fined here.

Update: Now: Pensions is up for sale.

22 January 2018

How can employers ensure engagement is integral to a benefits strategy?

Although this article is through a free subscription of Employee Benefits online magazine, it is definitely worth a read.

The tendency with many employers is to put employee benefits in place and then think about how to engage people with them, but if they do that they are doing things the wrong way round.

The benefits package is important, but engagement must follow on from employees feeling value in what they do.

Read the full article here

19 December 2017

The DWP has published their Auto Enrolment Review 2017.

Among their proposals, the DWP has confirmed that the lower age criteria will be reduced from 22 to 18.  The auto enrolment review also plans to have pension contributions calculated from the first pound earned. This is rather than the current lower earnings limit of £5,876. This effectively removes the ‘Entitled Worker’ category. Unfortunately, these reforms are not expected to be brought in until the mid-2020s. And many industries do feel this is too slow.

See the whole report here: Automatic Enrolment Review 2017: Maintaining the Momentum

10 December 2017

DWP puts forward an authorisation and supervision regime to ensure Master Trusts are fit for purpose

There are currently 87 master trusts looking after the retirement savings of 90% of the savers who have auto-enrolled. Despite this, the market has been largely unregulated. There are few requirements for setting up a new master trust and little regulatory oversight.

Now, more than 5 years into auto-enrolment, the DWP has put forward an authorisation and supervision regime. This regime is to ensure Master Trusts are fit for purpose. This is due to be launched in October 2018. It will ensure they meet a number of stringent standards on an ongoing basis.

The link below gives you much more detail, including the five criteria that these trusts will be assessed on by TPR.

Corporate Adviser – industry reaction

1 December 2017

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has successfully prosecuted Stotts Tours of Oldham.

Scotts Tours and their MD has been prosecuted for deliberately failing to provide staff with an Auto-Enrolment pension scheme.

They were found guilty of 16 offences. These involved willfully failing to comply with workplace pension legislation since their staging date in June 2015. Sentencing is scheduled for 14 December with the court able to impose an unlimited fine. TPR director of auto-enrolment, Darren Ryder, said: “auto-enrolment is not an option, it is the law. Employers should be in no doubt if they wilfully refuse to comply they could end up with a criminal record. And they will still have to give their staff the pensions they are due.”

Remember, auto-enrolment is only partially about the pension scheme itself, it is mainly about administration, data and process. Any employers that have a NEST pension scheme believing they have fulfilled their duties have only ticked one small box. Employers which pay just lip service to their workplace pension duties risk being sued.

TPR revealed that there was a surge in compliance notices relating to auto-enrolment being issued between July and September. 21,753 cases of auto-enrolment powers have been used, up 32% since Q2. Fixed Penalty Notices are up 28% to 24,779 (£400 one-off fine). Escalating Penalty Notices are up 37% to 5,331. That’s a daily fine between £50-£10,000 depending on the companies size).

Compliance and enforcement – Quarterly bulletin: July – September 2017

21 March 2017

Nearly a third of companies are seeking Auto-Enrolment support AFTER the deadline to do so has passed.

Companies that miss their staging dates face fines of up to £500. But The Pensions Regulator may be sympathetic if you act quickly.

The figures are based on 102 employers that registered with the pensions trust of the Corinthian Group in the last quarter of 2016.

Corinthian Affinity director Lee French commented. He said: “It is important that accountants, financial advisors and payroll providers get the message out now to their clients that swift action can help mitigate the potential fines if companies have missed their auto-enrolment staging date.

“Here at Corinthian, we have a ready-made, easy to use auto-enrolment solution which is compliant and cost-effective. It means our affinity partners can ensure their clients can have a qualifying workplace pension set up quickly and effectively, saving them time, money and stress.”

Companies missing their staging date are issued with an Escalating Penalty Notice by The Pensions Regulator. It orders business owners to comply with their statutory pensions duties within 28 days. After this time they will be subject to a fine which builds up by the day. For small employers (1 to 4 staff), the fine is £50 per day. For those with 5 to 49 staff, it is £500 per day.

New businesses offered a reprieve

The government has confirmed that new businesses will be offered a reprieve of up to three months before they have to enrol their employees in a workplace pension.

This reprieve is already in place for existing companies when they reach their staging date. However, it does not exist for new businesses entering the market.

The rule change is targeted specifically at employers whose employee headcount means they are automatically bound by auto-enrolment rules. Under current rules these new employers would have “near instantaneous AE duties applied to them.” The new rules come into force in April. They will ease this requirement, giving firms more time to deal with official administrative requirements for enrolling a new worker.

The rule change will also amend the auto-enrolment “duties trigger” for new businesses. Currently, the trigger date is the day on which PAYE income first becomes payable to any new worker. This means the employee couldn’t be automatically enrolled into a pension scheme until up to a month after starting work.

In future new businesses will have to comply with auto-enrolment legislation from the date the first worker begins his or her employment. The government says this change would make it easier for The Pensions Regulator to do its job.

Warnings issued to employers who fail to meet their pensions obligations deadlines have risen by 143 percent.

The increase refers to the 870 Escalating Penalty Notices issued in the last quarter of 2016. This brings the total number issued since auto-enrolment began to 1,477.

In the same period, the number of Fixed Penalty Notices – where companies are fined £400 for failing to comply with a statutory notice or specific employer duties – rose by 42 percent. Compliance notices, issued if an employer has contravened an auto-enrolment duty, have increased by a quarter.

In its report, The Pensions Regulator said it expected to see a rise in the use of its regulatory powers with the rollout of automatic enrolment for small and micro employers.

“Small employers can become non-compliant because they are more likely to leave things to the last minute. But in most cases the nudge of a compliance notice is enough to get them back on track.”

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