PAYROLL - 29.10.2020

“PAYE for employers” enhancements

Additions. HMRC’s “PAYE for employers” online service, which you can access from your Business Tax Account, is the quickest and easiest way to keep up to date with your organisation’s employer liabilities and payroll payments. Recently there have been a couple of new additions to the service.

Webchat. The first is a webchat facility which has been added to the 2020/21 annual statement page. If you see a green button at the bottom right-hand side of the page, you can click on it to ask HMRC a question. This will go to someone on the Employers’ helpdesk (depending on availability). HMRC will assess how successful the feature has been after three months and decide whether it will remain a permanent feature.

Tip. Given how long you sometimes have to wait for HMRC to answer the phone, try the webchat as an alternative for PAYE/NI enquiries.

New employment allowance (EA) status option. You can now check to see if you’ve claimed the £4,000 EA for the tax year by clicking on the EA status on the right-hand menu. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be working for one of our subscribers - it said they weren’t receiving the allowance when their PAYE account showed it being deducted from their monthly PAYE/NI liabilities. If you get a similar situation, you could always use the webchat to query it.

HMRC has added a trial webchat facility to the PAYE for employers online service which provides an alternative to HMRC’s lengthy phone queues. It has also added a new employment allowance status indicator, but we’re not convinced as to its accuracy.

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