Whether Sheard Accountancy prepares your payroll or if you prepare your own, this update provides ESSENTIAL information for those businesses that have placed, or intend to place any of their staff on furlough.
HMRC update – 15 April 2020
Following an update from HMRC on 15th April 2020, there have been changes to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, including changes regarding employee eligibility for furlough.
They state:
- You can now claim for employees that were employed as of 19 March 2020 and were on your PAYE payroll on or before that date; this means that you will have made an RTI submission notifying us of payment of that employee on or before 19 March 2020.
- Employees that were employed as of 28 February 2020 and on payroll (i.e. notified to us on an RTI submission on or before 28 February) and were made redundant or stopped working for you after that, and prior to 19 March 2020, can also qualify for the scheme if you re-employ them and put them on furlough.
In addition, HMRC outlined details on how to claim:
As you prepare to make a claim, please note:
- The online claim service will be launched on GOV.UK on 20 April 2020.
- The only way to make a claim is online – the service should be simple to use and any support you need available on GOV.UK; this will include help with calculating the amount you can claim.
- You can make the claim yourself even if you usually use an agent.
- Claims will be paid between 6 and 10 working days; you should not contact us unless it is absolutely necessary – any queries should be directed to your agent, representative or our webchat service.
- We cannot answer any queries from employees – they will need to raise these with you, as their employer, directly.
In order to make a claim to HMRC, you will require the following;
You will need to have the following before 20 April 2020:
- A Government Gateway ID and password – if you don't already have a Government Gateway account, you can apply for one online, or by going to GOV.UK 'HMRC services. Note that it can take up to 10 working days to open a Government Gateway account.
- Be enrolled for PAYE online – if you aren't registered yet, you can do so now, or by going to GOV.UK 'PAYE Online for employers'.
- The following information for each furloughed employee you will be claiming for:
- Name
- National Insurance number
- Claim period and claim amount
- PAYE/employee number (optional)
- If you have fewer than 100 furloughed staff – you will need to input information directly into the system for each employee
- If you have 100 or more furloughed staff – you will need to upload a file with information for each employee; we will accept the following file types: .xls .xlsx .csv .ods.”
If Sheards Accountancy prepare your payroll
If Sheards prepare your payroll and you want us to file a claim on your behalf, we can do this as we already have your authority. Unless you have informed us otherwise we will assume that you would like us to undertake the claim.
We will, however, double-check this with you no later than at the time of processing your next payroll. Note that if we are making the claim on your behalf you do not need your own Government Gateway account.
As soon as possible you will need to tell us which UK bank account you want the grant to be paid into, in order to ensure funds are paid as quickly as possible to you, and as stated above this can take up to 10 days after submitting the Furlough Claim. Please send those details to payroll@sheards.co.uk, or call the office on 01484 541155 and leave the relevant details with Lynne.
We have provided all our clients with an indication of possible fees for dealing with the claims on your behalf. We will be able to give much more clarity on this once we have processed a few claims. Be aware that this is a new and additional process and requires calculations entirely separate to those for the payroll. Each individual person on your payroll needs to be entered individually and this will be a time-consuming process.
We appreciate there are a lot of complexities to the process of furloughing employees and accessing the government support, therefore if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.