Temporary workers - your pension obligations
If you’re employing temporary workers for the summer season don’t forget that they have the same rights to join your workplace pension as permanent employees. What do you need to do?
Pension auto-enrolment
Workplace pensions have been around for over a decade. Despite this, every year some employers forget that temporary employees they take on, say during the summer period, have the same rights to workplace pensions as their full-time workers. Because of this HMRC is currently running a campaign to remind employers.
Assess and advise
If you’re an employer you must assess temporary staff for their right to be enrolled in your workplace pension scheme each time you pay them, even if they only work for you for a few days.
If you don’t assess your employees for entitlement to join your workplace pension it can result in a warning from HMRC or The Pensions Regulator. This can escalate to a fine of £400 initially and then daily penalties of between £50 and £10,000.
You can avoid having to assess your employees if they will work for you for no more than three months. Do this by using the auto-enrolment postponement procedure.
Related Topics
-
Selling spare items to your company
You’re short of cash but if you use the traditional methods to take more money out of your company you’ll pay higher rate taxes. Is there another way to extract profits without paying income tax or NI?
-
No such thing as a (tax) free lunch?
You run a small consultancy company and treat your staff to lunch in the office once a week. Your bookkeeper says it’s a taxable benefit in kind because staff lunches are only exempt if they are provided in a workplace canteen. Is this correct?
-
Judge criticises use of fabricated AI-generated cases in HMRC appeal
A tax tribunal judge has criticised the use of apparently fabricated case references generated by artificial intelligence in an appeal against HMRC. The incident highlights growing concerns over the use of AI tools in legal and tax proceedings. What happened?