Most problems arising during the RTI pilot scheme have been attributed to ‘bad data’. If you have the wrong information in your payroll it will result in the wrong information being received by HMRC and may mean the wrong tax codes are issued and your payroll department and HMRC being contacted by employees and former employees.
HMRC have published detailed guidelines on making your first submission to check that payroll records match.
Alex Rowson, Chair of BASDA’s HR & Payroll SIG comments:
“Notwithstanding the fact that pilot employer’s have hand-picked themselves and are therefore more likely to have ‘clean’ data, HMRC have said that with nearly 6 million employees being submitted on a regular basis through RTI the level of mismatches and manual reconciliations required is at a 13 month low.
The main advantage of RTI is that rather than have a single end-of-year reconciliation process, mismatches will be picked up as and when an employee is added to an employer’s database and their details submitted when they are first paid, and there have already been many instances of incorrect NI numbers that have been used for years being corrected as a result of NINO verifications being performed on every employees’ FPS submission.
There will of course be a spike during April when the majority of employers first start to file RTI, but this will be no different to the volume of mismatches HMRC will see when the 2012-2013 end-of-year filing reconciliation is performed in May.
Hopefully employers will have cleaned their data before submitting their 2012-2013 end of year returns.”
Information you must get right when running your payroll .