New employer end-of-year procedure
End-of-year changes. You may have read about the change to the regulations regarding the end-of-year reporting procedure for employers. This sounds important because, as you probably know, HMRC’s RTI reporting process can be sensitive. But actually there’s not much to it and in practice employers can ignore the change if they wish.
What’s new? The alteration simply means that HMRC will accept the final RTI report for 2014/15 without the normal year-end questions being answered (see The next step ). A few software providers will update their payroll programs to remove the questions, so don’t be surprised if you can’t find them. Just complete the report as usual.
No software update. In practice, we expect most software not to be updated in time for the tax year end. If that’s the case you’ll almost certainly need to answer the end-of-year questions before your software will allow you to transmit your final RTI report for 2014/15. HMRC has said that its bare bones payroll program, Basic PAYE Tools , won’t be updated until July 2015.
Year-end indicator. More important than this change is the need for employers to indicate when they make their final RTI report for 2014/15. If you forget to do this you’ll be bombarded with reminders asking for your final full payment submission (FPS) and ultimately you’ll receive penalty notices from HMRC.
Tip. If you make your final FPS for 2014/15 (this should be before 6 April 2015), but don’t indicate that it was the last one, you can send an employer payment summary (EPS) up to 19 April instead. If, for any reason, you need to make a correction to your final FPS or EPS after that date, you must use an earlier year update procedure (see The next step ).
For details of the end-of-year questions and the earlier year update procedure, visit http://tipsandadvice-tax.co.uk/download (TX 15.11.01).
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