This update was first published in the March 2012 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.
The Pensions Regulator has increased its communications in the build-up to the mandatory registration deadlines.
When to act? This is dependent on the number of employees, but employers will need to have considered how they can comply with the registration process, including how changes to existing pension scheme rules apply by the announced staging dates, which are as follows:
- businesses with more than 3,000 staff have a staging date on or before 1 July 2013
- businesses with between 50 and 2,999 staff will have a staging date of between August 2013 and March 2015
- businesses with 49 staff or fewer will begin automatically enrolling their staff from May 2015.
By the above dates employers will have had to amend existing pension scheme rules or established a new company scheme and will have registered their scheme online with the Pensions Regulator.
Employers will need to ensure that their pension scheme offering complies with a number of conditions including that a new starter is eligible to join an employer pension scheme from their first day of employment.