Over 100,000 small and micro employers reach their staging date by the end of the year.
So what do you need to do before you stage?
- Find out your staging date, this the date when your obligation under Auto Enrolment will start, the Pension Regulator calculator is a good place to start
- Nominate a person to be the Pension Regulators key contact and register their name with the Regulator
- Draw up a Project Plan and consider whether you need help (60% of companies currently staging have decided they do need help! and most businesses will start by asking their accountant to help with project management)
- Choose a Pension Provider – Nest, Now Pensions and The Peoples Pension are the 3 largest
The fine for small employers with 1 to 4 staff who fail to comply with an EPN is £50 per day and for those with 5 to 49 it is £500 per day.
The Pension Regulator statistics for the first quarter of 2016 show that the number of fixed penalties were 806 compared to the penalties for the whole year of 2015 which were 1,250, so penalties are increasing, partly due to increasing numbers of small businesses being required to enrol.
The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has highlighted the following problem areas:
- Employer forgeting to do the declaration of compliance within 5 months of staging, many employers wrongly assumed that registering on the Government Gateway was enough.
- Confusion caused by running multiple payrolls for the same employer for example weekly and monthly
- Completing the declaration of compliance but without choosing a pension provider
- Omitting self employed workers who have a contract to provide work personally