Employee Penions - Auto Enrolment
29 October 2012
Companies need to allow at least 18 months of preparation to deal with the complexities of the new automatic enrolment for pensions being introduced from 2012-2016.
On 1 October 2012, auto-enrolment for employees aged 22 and over was officially launched for organisations employing more than 120,000 staff. Under the phased implementation programme, companies with 250 employees or less will be introduced in stages from April 2014, while those with fewer than 50 will be phased in from June 2015 to April 2017.The potential trouble spots for employers include:
- communicating with workers
- the cost and quality of schemes
- altering payroll processes
We would recommend that you start preparing your company now for pension auto enrolment by following the stages below:
- Find out your staging date for pensions auto-enrolment. You can find this out from the Pension Regulator
- Assess your workforce to ascertain who is eligible for auto-enrolment
- Review your pension arrangements – if you have a current pension scheme, ensure that it qualifies for the scheme. If you do not have a pension scheme in place, you will have to choose one.
- Communicate the changes to all your workers, you are required to by law.
- Automatically enroll your 'eligible workers' and give guidance on ‘opting out’.
- Register with The Pensions Regulator and keep records
- Contribute to your workers' pensions
For further information you can contact Sam Park at our Lurgan office or by e-mail at sam@dalypark.com