A survey by AutoenrolSME found that 6 out 10 businesses can’t cope and hired additional staff to manage the process!
A Poll in April 2014 of 200 businesses with 62 to 249 employees found:
63% of the employers didn’t know when their staging date was.
58% had not set up an auto-enrolment pension scheme.
90.5% of employers without an auto-enrolment pension scheme hadn’t even started researching one.
If you think you can ignore Auto Enrolment, think again, The Pensions Regulator will make you comply……..
Non-statutory action
We can issue guidance and instruction by telephone, email, letter and in person. Or we can send a warning letter confirming a set time frame for compliance with the duties.
Statutory notices
Statutory notices can direct you to comply with your duties and / or pay any contributions you have missed or are late in paying. We have further discretionary powers which allow us to estimate and charge interest on unpaid contributions and direct you to calculate and / or pay unpaid contributions.
Penalty notices
We can issue penalty notices to punish persistent and deliberate non-compliance.
A fixed penalty notice will be issued if you don’t comply with statutory notices, or if there’s sufficient evidence of a breach of the law. This is fixed at £400 and payable within a specific period.
We can also issue an escalating penalty notice for failure to comply with a statutory notice. This penalty has a prescribed daily rate of £50 to £10,000 depending on the number of staff you have.
We can issue a civil penalty for cases where you fail to pay contributions due. This is a financial penalty of up to £5,000 for individuals and up to £50,000 for organisations.
Where employers fail to comply with a compliance notice or there is evidence of a breach, we can issue a prohibited recruitment conduct penalty notice. This is currently set at a maximum fixed daily rate of £5,000 for organisations with over 250 staff. We aim to fully recover all the penalties that we issue.
Court action
We can take civil action through the court to recover penalties.
Employers who deliberately and wilfully fail to comply with their duties may be prosecuted.
We can also confiscate goods where there is a criminal conviction and restrain assets during criminal investigations.
The first case was Dunelm http://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/docs/section-89-dunelm.pdf
Research shows that Accountants are most likely to be asked to help SME’s and Business Accountant (a service provided by CIMA Members in Practice) have created a booking service to assist SME’s in getting help https://business-accountant.com/auto-enrolment/
So don’t be scared by Auto Enrolment, don’t delay drawing up a project plan, take action now to avoid problems with the Pension Regulator later!
steve@bicknells.net
Business Accountant 
We have just passed our staging date (1 May) and have successfully auto-enrolled eligible staff. We started the process 7 months ago and did it all in-house, but we did take advice on specific issues when we thought it was required. If I was starting the process again I would engage an external adviser at the beginning because it is easy to under estimate the amount of work required, as you have to review both your pension arrangements and the ability of your payroll software to cope with the assessment and calculations. I now realise it takes a lot of the worry away if you can just talk it through with someone. There is a lot of information on the Pension Regulator’s web-site but you have to take the time to read and understand it and how it applies to your particular situation. My advice is, if you are not already too far along your AE journey engage an adviser, you will sleep much more soundly!