With wages bills constantly under scrutiny as a way of saving tax and national insurance, employers often don’t think about looking at other ways of rewarding their employees. One of the first stages of planning an alternative way of remunerating your staff is to establish what they may or may not deem to be of [...]
Auto enrolment, which came into effect on 1st October 2012, has already been rolled out to large employers. Thanks, at least in some part, to the experience of these employers, the process is due to go through a simplification process in 2014, with a particular focus on helping small businesses deal with the whole system, [...]
While the vast majority of UK employers respect the rules and pay their employees at least the National Minimum Wage (NMW), there are still a small number of employers who choose to ignore this legal obligation. HMRC are currently in the process of identifying sectors they suspect as falling foul of the rules and targeting [...]
Real Time Information (RTI) is one of the biggest changes to affect PAYE for just short of 70 years, but a recent survey by The Federation of Small Businesses (the FSB) has alarmingly revealed that over a quarter of respondents questioned about the forthcoming payroll changes were in the dark. The UK-wide survey revealed that [...]
The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) recently exposed that over a quarter of employees are in the dark with regard some of the details on their payslip; almost 15% don’t check their payslip and over one in twenty employees never even look at it. These finding were the result of research carried out by [...]
The tax break for hiring new workers in certain geographical areas has not had the take-up expected by the government. The plan, which was announced by George Osborne in his 2010 budget, was designed to give up to 400,000 small businesses relief on National Insurance payments for the first 10 staff hired. The Chancellor’s initiative [...]
HM Revenue & Customs have announced that from 1 January 2012 employers will be required to pay VAT on remuneration, paid in the form of goods or services rather than salary, such as vouchers and cycle-to-work schemes. These changes have come from the Court of Justice of the European Union which ruled that there is [...]
It has been revealed that Andy Coulson was receiving several hundred thousand pounds in payments from News International after he had started working as the current UK government’s media advisor. After working for News International for 2 years he then resigned from his post. Due to the terms of his contract he was then paid [...]
The Payments Council, the organisation that sets strategy for UK payment methods, has announced that the previously advised target for scrapping cheques of 2018 has been cancelled. They have further explained that cheques will remain for as long as people and businesses need them. However, the use of cheque guarantee cards were scrapped from 30 [...]
UK ministers are opposing European proposals to give workers 20 weeks of maternity leave on full pay. The UK stance is that the proposals will be too costly for businesses and are regressive in that the higher paid a worker is the more they will benefit under the proposals. Someone on £10,000 pa would be [...]
