Over 1000 non-compliance fines for auto enrolment issued in Q4 2015

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) have released their monthly round-up of auto enrolment news.

The most startling point from the bulletin is that over 63% of all non-compliance notices issued by TPR since 2012 have been issued between October-December 2015.

The regulator state that more than 90% of the first small employers required to enrol their staff into a workplace pension have now complied with the law. TPR state that this shows that auto enrolment and the workplace pension reform is successful for all sizes of employer.

There are around 500,000 businesses due to stage for auto enrolment in 2016. TPR’s figures suggest that around 10% will fail to comply and receive warnings or fixed penalty notices; this would mean that a massive 50,000 UK businesses could receive warnings or heavy fines for non-compliance.

TPR is warning SMEs to plan for auto enrolment in good time, most compliance notices were issued because employers had left their preparations too late. TPR and IRIS recommend that businesses begin to prepare for workplace pensions 12 months before their staging date.

If your business is due to stage in 2016 or beyond, IRIS have auto enrolment solution to help make the process a stress-free as possible. We have a wide range of auto enrolment help on our website, and also run regular, free webinars on auto enrolment which are presented by the CEO of our SME Division, Mark Paraskeva, and our auto enrolment experts. Take a look at our latest webinars and be sure to register today.

Minister for Pensions, Ros Altmann had this to say:

“The latest figures highlight the on-going success of auto-enrolment. It is really encouraging to see that so far, the vast majority of small and micro employers have set up a workplace pension for their staff and are helping them on their way to a more financially secure retirement. From now on, the smallest employers will start to meet their obligations and we must ensure they know what to do and have help if they need it.

“So far 5.8 million people have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. Thanks to automatic enrolment workplace pensions are becoming the norm and we expect 9 million people to be newly saving or saving more.”

Key points include:

- 4,818 compliance warning notices have now been issued

- 2,596 compliance warning notices issued between October 1st and December 31st 2015

- 1,594 fixed penalty notices have been issued to non-complying businesses in total since 2012

- 1,013 of these fixed penalty notices were issues between October 1st and December 31st 2015

Source: The Pensions Regulator