Starting in the 2013/14 tax year, HMRC are looking to change the way employers report on pay and taxation of employees. This will have important implications for all our customers who are running a payroll, so we thought we’d give you a heads-up.

Incorrect Employee Data

Data held about employees by the employer will be cross checked against HMRC’s database to ensure it is correct.

According to HMRC, in the 2009/10 tax year there were

507 employees named Mr A. N. Other
128 Mr, Ms, or Mrs Dummy
824 people with surname “Unknown”
1,000 people with national insurance number AB123456
40 employees aged over 200 years old

If your data doesn’t match HMRCs, submissions of data to HMRC will fail. This can lead to penalties, frustration, panicked tickets to our support team, and all round bad karma.

It’s best to act now to ensure your employee’s full name, gender, date of birth, and NI number is correct. See HMRC’s guide here.

Real Time Filing

At Clear Books we have already begun work on integrating our Open Payroll software with HMRC real time reporting, and we will make sure that all our customers can file RTI by the deadline of April 2013.

Posted by Darren Taylor

Darren is a Marketing Manager specialising in Digital Marketing