From 1st April, tens of thousands of businesses in the UK will need to begin auto-enrolling their employees into a workplace pension scheme.
Businesses with 50 to 249 persons in their PAYE scheme will be expected to auto-enrol their employees into a workplace pension. Employers with fewer than 50 persons in their PAYE scheme will be staged between 1st June 2015 and 1st April 2017 – although some may have earlier staging dates.
From small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), tasks such as compiling and verifying employee data, ensuring that they have everything their pension provider requires, and communicating with employees is likely to prove onerous.
For those businesses that don’t have a workplace pension scheme in place, time really is of the essence, not just in terms of finding a suitable scheme, but also in meeting the provider’s requirements on transferring HR and employee information.
The procedure for registering with NEST (National Employment Savings Trust), the government pension scheme, takes only a week. However employers should look more widely.
The issue with NEST is that it offers little in terms of employer added-value services, such as workforce assessment tools or automated statutory communications. This can mean that an employer needs to deal with most of the onerous administrative responsibilities on their own.
Read More: ACCA Magazine 03/2014, ‘Time to step up’, page 30.
http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/employer/supporting-members/ab-direct.html
