What happens if we don't comply, are late complying or miss our automatic enrolment staging date?

12094

What happens if we don't comply, are late complying or miss our automatic enrolment staging date?

6th April 2018

IRIS PAYE-Master, IRIS Payroll Business, IRIS Bureau Payroll, IRIS GP Payroll, IRIS Payroll Professional, Earnie, IRIS Earnie IQ

All employers need to comply with their duties under automatic enrolment, it's the law.

If you ignore your duties you may face enforcement action from the pensions regulator.

This information is provided by the pension regulator, click here for more details.

Key Points:

• The responsibility for complying with the employer duties rests with you. 
• If you do not comply, you may face enforcement action. 
• Enforcement action usually starts with statutory notices and is followed by penalty notices, which the pension regulator can recover through the courts. 
• If you comply late, the pension regulator expects you to pay back any missed contributions to put staff in the position they would have been in if they had complied on time; this may include backdating contributions to the staging date. 
• Deliberately failing to enrol eligible staff and knowingly including false information in a declaration of compliance are criminal offences and may result in prosecution.

If you are late complying with your duties

In cases where you haven’t understood your duties or have been unable to comply, the pensions regulator can provide support and work with you to get you compliant. However, if you have chosen to ignore their duties, the pensions regulator has powers to ensure compliance.

If you are late complying or think you might be, you should tell the pensions regulator about it straight away. The pensions regulator policy is that employers should take reasonable steps to put all workers back in the position they would have been in if they had complied on time. The employer should not profit from their mistake.

For example, if you fail to enrol a worker from their staging date, you should:
• enrol them in a pension scheme, and treat the staging date as the automatic enrolment date
• ensure members of staff are in the position they would have been in had the employer complied on time, in other words, we expect the employer to backdate contributions so that the member of staff does not lose out
• give staff the option to pay their own backdated contributions – the staff can choose whether or not they wish to do this

This information is provided by the pension regulator, click here for more details.