Annual schemes are now ‘go’
Up until now HMRC have been unable to act upon the requests of employers to change the status of their PAYE schemes to an annual one under the Real Time Information (RTI) regime.
An annual scheme must meet one of the following requirements:
- all the employees are paid annually
- all the employees are paid within the same, single tax month
- the employer is only required to pay HMRC annually
Once a business is registered as an annual scheme, an Employer Payment Summary (EPS) is not required for 11 months of the tax year where no payments are made to the employees.
If an employer pays one or more of its employees for more than a single month in the year, HMRC will automatically cancel the annual payer status for not only that year but subsequent years as well. The employer will be notified of such in writing and expected to revert to filing and payment on a monthly basis.
HMRC have now given employers the green light and will accept all the requests that have been made and change those schemes to annual ones. The department will not, however, be notifying employers when that change has been made.
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