Most employers will need to report under Real Time Information from April 2013.  Ultimately this will prevent fraudulent delaying of PAYE payments as firms who ‘forget’ to pay their PAYE will now need to declare what PAYE should have been deducted.  This will also spread a firm’s administrative burden throughout the year and for these reasons I believe it should be applauded.

However in the meantime it is placing yet another administrative burden on employers as they must perform a one off alignment exercise to make sure the records they hold of employees exactly matches the records held by HMRC.

The HMRC are threatening to impose penalties for any error so if for example your records show someone is called Mike but the HMRC have them as Michael they are threatening to penalise you although the latest indications are that they will be lenient on this.

Ultimately as long as the HMRC are not too heavy handed initially this is probably a good thing and employers will just have to grin and bear the initial additional workload.

We are holding a number of seminars on RTI. Please visit the seminars section of our website for details.