If you have more than one employee, you now have to enrol anyone who is eligible into a workplace pension scheme and contribute towards it, according to Stockport accountants, IN Accountancy.
Rules around ‘Automatic Enrolment’ into a workplace pension scheme are here to stay. To avoid penalties (that start at £50 per day but can increase to £10,000 per day depending on the size of the company), you need to find out the key facts.
Pension Regulator Fines
The Pensions Regulator (TPR) hit employers failing in their duty to provide auto-enrolment pension schemes with a record number of fines for the first three months of the year, as smaller firms join the ranks of companies who have to comply with the law.
TPR issued 96 escalating penalty notices against employers in the first quarter of 2016, the most it has issued over any quarter, bringing the total to 127.
The notices are among the statutory powers TPR has to help ensure employers comply with auto-enrolment duties.
They specify the date by which an employer must comply with certain actions or be subject to a fine which builds up at a daily rate, from £50 to £10,000 per day.
Over the first quarter of the year, TPR also issued 3,057 compliance notices – issued to remedy a contravention of one or more automatic enrolment employer duty provisions – bringing the total to 7,834.
Under legislation introduced in 2012, all employers must eventually offer a workplace pension scheme and automatically enrol eligible workers in it.
Smaller firms conform
Larger employers have been required to apply the law since October 2012. But now smaller firms have to meet the same rules that will apply to all employers by 2018.
To avoid being fined, employers must make sure they start planning early, find out their staging date and understand what and when they need to do to comply with their automatic enrolment duties, she said.
However TPR said its research showed 95 per cent of the first small employers required to put their staff into a workplace pension have now complied with the law, showing auto-enrolment is successful for all sizes of employer.
