9th July 2015

The Pensions Regulator: AE Industry Liaison Manager update - July 2015

If there are any particular topics you would like to hear about, your feedback would be welcome. Please feel free to circulate this email to appropriate colleagues and any third party contacts and introducers.

•      Sign up for our webinar on 14^th July –‘ What’s my role as a business adviser? ’

Do you know when you’re allowed to give your clients advice on automatic enrolment and where you cross the line into regulated financial advice?
 
We’re hosting a free webinar for accountants, bookkeepers, payroll professionals and other business advisers at 2pm on 14 July. We’ll tell you all about the areas where advisers have told us they want more information, including:

• Assessing and enrolling staff – who has duties and who is exempt?
• Your role in helping your clients choose a pension scheme – how you can help your clients and what you can and can’t do.

We’ll also give you hints and tips on some of the steps that may take a little more time, or which you may be less familiar with, such as setting up your clients’ payroll, or sole director companies. This will be followed by a live Q&A session with our resident experts.

Register for the webinar here.

•       Our drive towards simplifying our language

This is to give notice that we are striving to simplify the language we use on our website and in our publications for small and micro employers.  We are also planning to make it easier for employers to identify whether they have any duties.  These changes to our website are ongoing, but significant changes are planned for early Autumn.

•      View our updated video on director exemptions

Find out if your director clients are exempt from the automatic enrolment duties. Click on this link:  www.tpr.gov.uk/ILT-director-video

The update is to give additional guidance on how to tell us your client or your company is exempt.

If your clients  receive a letter which includes their staging date and you believe that automatic enrolment duties don’t apply to them, because they are a director only company, you or the employer need to let us know at https://automation.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/notanemployer

•        Annual Report and Accounts 2014-2015 published

Some automatic enrolment highlights:

• More than 33,000 employers, across one three month period, submitted their online declaration on time - three times more than all large employers
• 787,000 letters raising awareness of automatic enrolment were dispatched in 2014-2015
• We received over 175,000 inbound contacts from scheme members, trustees, employers and advisers about a range of issues
• 57,635 subscribe to our news by email service
• Analysis of ultimate compliance rates for employers reveals 99% of eligible jobholders have been automatically enrolled into a qualifying scheme

Read the full report at: www.tpr.gov.uk/docs/annual-report-and-accounts-2014-2015.pdf

•        Bulk data

You may not be aware that we support facilities to receive certain data for multiple employers in bulk:

• Bulk Staging Date data – useful if you have a large number of clients and would like to find their staging date (and have permission to use your clients’ PAYE references for this).
• Bulk Declaration of Compliance (DoC) facilities - if you intend to offer DoC as a service, you can now upload multi-employer declaration details directly into our website.

To apply for either of these bulk data facilities, contact us at AEDataRequest@thepensionsregulator.gov.uk

Request a guest speaker at https://secure.tpr.gov.uk/speaker-request.aspx

Auto-Enrolment