Every three months the pensions regulator, the body responsible for the implantation and enforcement of automatic enrolment, issues a report. This report talks about how many companies have been fined and the mistakes employers are making when complying with automatic enrolment which results in these fines.

This report is called the not so snappily titled “Compliance and Enforcement quarterly bulletin”

Now the reality is that most employers aren’t aware of this report. Even fewer have read it. Fewer still read it regularly.

However for the hundreds of thousands of the employers who need to comply with automatic enrolment over the course of the next year as well as the hundreds of thousands who need to comply in 2017 and 2018 and beyond there are some important pointers in this report.

The latest one (which you can find here) highlights three things really clearly:-

Firstly enforcement activity is increasing. In the last 3 months of 2015 the pension regulator used their enforcement powers 3,732 times. In total, and since 2012, the regulator has used these same powers 6,746 times…

This means that 55% of all powers of enforcement ever used (since 2012) have been used in the last 3 months of 2015.

A sign that the market is changing and the regulator has powers of enforcement (which includes hitting employers with significant fines) and ain’t afraid to use them.

The second thing worth noting is the clear statement highlighting this to be the case. On one of the pages written direct from the regulator the message is clear…

“We will not tolerate non compliance. It’s not fair to employees if they lose out on contributions they are due.”

I don’t think there’s a great amount of ambiguity in that statement. I think it makes the point absolutely clear…

To avoid the implications (which include fines) employers need to ensure that comply with the law.

However the third and final thing I want to highlight in this particular article is the most important and tells the story of a company who has recently been fined £10,000.

You see this employer (who is in the sports sector but name is not disclosed) engaged a financial adviser to help them comply.

This should have meant that, as the employer engaged with a professional, an automatic enrolment project was put in place and the actions taken should have made sure that the employers nose was clean automatic enrolment wise.

Now whilst it’s not clear what specifically it’s obvious that something went wrong with the process of compliance…

This could be for a bunch of different issues and with many of these issues AE in a Box helps.

Firstly it may be that the process to compliance wasn’t clear either to the employer or the professional...

…which is why AE in a Box highlights the process of how to comply with automatic enrolment step by step.

Secondly it may be that there was some confusion on who’s responsibility it is to complete each compliance ‘task’…

…which is why AE in a Box allows professionals to complete tasks on an employer tasks but has a clear audit trail which highlights who has done what job and keeps tracks of this.

and

Thirdly it may be that either the professional or the employer didn’t know where to get help and didn’t feel they could go direct to the regulator…

…which is why AE in a Box has a couple of tools giving you access to support throughout the automatic enrolment compliance process.

Now, there’s a bunch of other stuff on AE in a Box too including a pension selection tool, a payroll checker and a contributions calculator. There’s also support for employees and the platform is constantly building and evolving designed to ensure that both our professional and employer users manage both their initial and ongoing journey through automatic enrolment compliance.

You see our mission is to make it easier for small and micro employers to make the process of automatic enrolment easier.

Our mission is to ensure employers avoid fines by complying successfully.

Our mission is to help.

Let us know how we can help you…