Your three year auto-enrolment anniversary

Under the auto enrolment pension rules, every three years an employer must put certain employees back into a pension scheme. The process is called re-enrolment and as payroll specialists in the SME market, we have a number of clients we are working with as they approach their deadline.

If the 5 years of staging has taught us anything, it’s the value of preparation. If your business is approaching the three-year anniversary of your original staging date, the process of re-enrolment and re-declaration is a legal duty and it is important to meet the obligations or face financial penalties.

Your re-declaration of compliance will be due within 5 months of the 3^rd anniversary of the previous staging or enrolment date, no matter the current chosen re-enrolment date.

Your duties will vary depending on whether you identify that you do or don’t have staff to re-enrol.  Either way, you will need to complete a re-declaration of compliance to outline how you have met your duties.

With sensible lead-in times and sound preparation, the introduction of auto enrolment proved to be less of an obstacle for SME’s than had been feared. Our objective is to ensure that this next stage will also be as pain-free as possible for our clients.

Re-enrolment is essentially an extension of your normal payroll compliance process. Payroll software or your outsourced provider should help with this. You would already be evidencing your assessments and making contributions for enrolled employees, so with a good existing process, re-enrolling any eligible jobholders that have not opted out within the previous 12 months should be straight-forward.

The process of re-enrolment is outlined on the website of the Pensions Regulator. If your business is preparing for re-enrolment and you wish to review your existing processes and procedures, our specialist payroll team can support you with this. For further information, please contact James Alesbury on 023 8046 1222 for a no obligation chat.