The Pensions Regulator urges accountants to prepare for automatic enrolment

The Pension Regulator is calling on accountants, bookkeepers and IFAs to help clients through automatic enrolment and this means getting to grips themselves with the new legislations.    

The vast majority of employers have consulted or plan to consult with an existing advisor – 89% of SMEs and 64% of micro employers - and the use or planned use of accountants in particular is more prominent amongst those employers with a later staging date.

Surprisingly, despite this, Accountants and Bookkeepers were least likely to have used The Pension Regulator’s website with just 39% and 48% respectively being aware that it is a source of information and just 48% of accountants are planning to offer a service to clients.

Automatic enrolment is a massive opportunity for accountants and bookkeepers and those firms who aren’t up-to-speed with the legislation and who don’t have processes in place to help struggling clients could find themselves losing business to other firms.

Finding out your clients staging dates in one way to start preparing as these could be sooner than you think.  You can look up multiple staging dates on The Pension Regulator’s website, you’ll just need to know their PAYE reference:

https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/professionals/multiple-staging-dates-for-small-business-clients.aspx

Are you prepared to help your clients?  Join a 30 minute free IRIS webinar to find out how you can win new business by providing automatic enrolment services to your clients.

Download our free guide “Making the most of automatic enrolment – How can accountants capitalise on this new opportunity”

This concern is something that IRIS shares and we are helping accountants and businesses every day understand sufficiently the existence or implications of workplace pensions. 
The campaign also raises concerns over the volume of businesses needing to deal with automatic enrolment. IRIS is well equipped with scalable automatic enrolment solutions but good quality and appropriate advice is likely to come at a premium as the volume of businesses staging increases. 
The ‘No-one gets left behind’ campaign highlights the eight things you need to know to be ready for auto enrolment including communications, data management skills, scheme selection and sheer manpower required
The campaign also raises concerns over the volume of businesses needing to deal with automatic enrolment. IRIS is well equipped with scalable automatic enrolment solutions but good quality and appropriate advice is likely to come at a premium as the volume of businesses staging increases. 
To find out how IRIS are helping businesses and accountants stage visit iris.co.uk/aeinsightIRIS are proud to be supporting the ‘No-one gets left behind’ campaign launched by Accounting Web. The campaign has been launched to alert as many accountants as possible to the obligations implied by automatic enrolment.