You may be an employer who is liable for a filing penalty and you may have received a quarterly notice this month.
Penalty notices come with details that instruct you to show the penalty notice to your agents as copies are no longer sent directly to them. Included in the letter are all the filing penalties that may have been incurred between the 6th October 2014 and the 3rd January 2015. each penalty listed in the letter is given its own identification number which is unique, but this make it simple to refer to it.
A new Generic Notification System is in place under the RTI Scheme and this results in messages being sent automatically should there be a possibility of you incurring a penalty, the idea is for the automatic message to be a reminder for you to update your PAYE situation. Should you be appealing a penalty it will also provide updates.
Avoiding Penalties
The first is to ensure that a Full Payment Submission is sent containing the appropriate PAYE details either on or before the earliest date for payment. A late reporting reason will have to be included should you be late reporting a payment on FPS, the list of codes can be found at https://www.gov.uk/what-payroll-information-to-report-to-hmrc#late-reporting-reason.
An Employer Payment Summary will have to be sent should you not be paying anyone for a particular month, this is to ensure that HMRC are aware that no reports will be submitted during this time. If your payroll is run by an agent then it is vital that all payroll information is received by them so that they can meet the deadlines for reporting. Finally, should there be any changes to the payments made to your employees then these should be reported.
