PAYE RTI News
Further problems for PAYE Dashboard
January 29, 2014
HMRC have acknowledged further difficulties presenting correct employer PAYE balances on their Business Tax Dashboard for PAYE months 9 and 10 (December, January). The announcement on 29 January, made via the What’s New pages of HMRC’s website, confirms that HMRC have experienced difficulties with presenting the correct employer balances for the third month in a row and follows similar problems in PAYE month 8 (November). The problems mean that some employers’ tax liabilities may be overstated on their Payments and Liabilities viewer as a result of duplicated employments being created in HMRC systems.
The fault, according to the HMRC message, is linked to details submitted by employers on their Full Payment Submissions causing a new employment to be created in HMRC’s systems. Additional liabilities had then been created automatically in respect of these ‘new’ employments, in HMRC’s systems. HMRC says new employments have been created in two instances:
- employee leaver details relating to the 2012-13 tax year or earlier have been incorrectly included on any Full Payment Submissions (FPS) submitted this tax year;
- live payment data in respect of the same employee is included on a subsequent FPS.
Those affected by the issue do not need to take any action: HMRC states that it is taking steps to identify and correct the relevant PAYE schemes and aims to complete these fixes by February 10. HMRC apologised for the inconvenience but reminded employers to follow guidance on its website on how to correctly report employee leavers.
HMRC’s announcement may appear contradictory as it offers both an apology to employers for inconvenience caused but simultaneously attributes the responsibility for the error to employer’s own incorrect reporting of RTI data. It is not obvious where actual responsibility for these errors lies and, if with employers, no explanation is offered as to why these errors have begun to appear only after some 8/9 months of otherwise successful reporting of RTI by, as HMRC has itself said, the majority of UK employers.
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