Safe Computing Autumn Release Notes Safe EMS 5.09 October 2014
Contents Introduction 4 ROI Statutory Enhancements 5 Calculation of statutory deductions on payments after leaving 5 Pension Age Limits 5 USC able Pay and USC able Deductions 6 Medical Insurance 7 Set up of Payments/Deductions 7 Medical YTD 8 P35L Medical Insurance 10 P35L Updates 10 P35L Display of employee data 10 P35L Supplements 11 Special Characters on P35L 13 P35L and multiple employments 13 PAYE Refunds where there is zero pay 13 USC and Tax During Payment of Illness Benefit 13 Refunds of Tax and USC where Gross Pay is Zero 14 P45 Older than Previous Year 14 UK Statutory Enhancements 15 Performance on the Generation of FPS 15 Pension Cyclical Re-enrolment 15 Pay Group Set Up 16 Main Calculation 17 Entitled Workers Employer Contribution 17 Issue Resolution 18 I5222 - Pensioner Payroll and Creation of a P45 (Call Log 148813) 18 R7256 - Trivial Commutation (Call Log 149645) 18 R7262 - Early FPS Submissions for New Tax Year (Call Log 145488) 18 R7265 - QSV Error (Call Log 149645) 18 R7272 Export Message for FPS 18 Page 2 of 21 07 October 2014
R7280 - Count of forms in PAYE Online Inbox (Call Logs 148524, 150172) 18 R7269 Duplication of GEN Forms 18 E51645 NEST Extract for Prior Periods 18 E51726 DEA Report 18 Safe EMS Enhancements/Fixes 18 E51735 TPP Number Maintenance 18 E51757 Data Population Wizard (Call Log 147055) 19 E51762 MyView New User Email Attaments (Call Log 146565) 19 E51771 Calendar Workflow Trigger Filter 20 E51794 Calendar Workflow Employee Status (Call Log 149422) 20 E51774 - TUPE Holiday Scheme Allocation (Call Log 148050) 20 E51786 Net to Gross Calculation (Call Log 148724) 20 E51788 Allow Negative Offset (Call Log 149441) 21 E51789 Deletion of Overlapping Absence (Call Log 149328) 21 E51790 Irish Specific Payments/Deductions (Call Log 149290) 21 E51770 Expense Costing Calculation (Call Log 147468) 21 E51780 Import of Pension Schemes 21 Page 3 of 21 07 October 2014
Introduction This document accompanies the release version of 5.09 of Safe EMS relating to statutory enhancements/fixes. It is suggested that you ensure that all relevant personnel within your organisation have visibility of this document and consider the updates in light of your use of Safe EMS. All Safe EMS customers who operate ROI legislation will be required to upgrade their application prior to the ROI year end. Please note that ROI budget is yet to be announced and there may be a service pack following this release to contain any final changes that are announced. Version 5.09 is optional for those customers who operate UK legislation only. Page 4 of 21 07 October 2014
ROI Statutory Enhancements Calculation of statutory deductions on payments after leaving Safe EMS has been enhanced that where a leaver receives a payment after leaving, the statutory deductions will be calculated in the period that they are made a leaver rather than in the period they received the payment. Therefore, the payment after leaving will not receive another week/month allowances. Pension Age Limits Relief from income tax is available in respect of pension contributions (including AVCs). Relief is granted by deducting the amount of the contribution from gross pay before PAYE is calculated. There are limits to the amount of relief on earnings which is dependent on the employee s age: The main calculation report will display a warning message where any of these percentage limits are reached. The user will then need to decide on the appropriate action. Page 5 of 21 07 October 2014
USC able Pay and USC able Deductions Safe EMS used the taxable pay to determine if the pay was also liable for USC (with the exception of Illness Benefit). Safe EMS has been enhanced to specify if a payment is liable for USC and if a deduction can receive USC relief or be included into the USC able Pay. Examples of this are: Payment/Deduction Description Taxable USC able Payment Illness Benefit Yes No Deduction Pension Yes No Deduction Employer PRSA No Yes In the payment maintenance screen, a new USC able % field has been added. This has been defaulted to 100.00 during the upgrade process. Users are advised to review their payments and to determine if this percentage should be changed. In the deduction maintenance screen there are 2 new fields: USC Relief % - If a deduction requires the USC able pay to be reduced by the deduction before USC is calculated, the percentage value would require setting. The default value for this field is 0.00 USC able If a deduction should be added into USC able pay (an example of this is Employer PRSA), change the option to Yes. Page 6 of 21 07 October 2014
Below are some examples of how the pay for PRSI, PAYE and USC could vary: Deduction set up Description Deduct From Type Tax Relief % USC Relief USC able Yes/No PRSA EE PRSA 100.00 0.00 No PRSA ER PRSA 0.00 0.00 Yes Maintenance EE Normal 0.00 100.00 No Breakdown in Pay Items Pay Type Value Breakdown Gross Pay 3000.00 Pay to employee Maintenance deduction 175.00 Employee PRSA 200.00 Employer PRSA 175.00 Taxable Pay 2800.00 Gross Pay minus Employee PRSA PRSI able Pay 3000.00 No relief given USC able Pay 2975.00 Gross pay plus Employer PRSA minus maintenance deduction Medical Insurance If employers contribute to a medical insurance scheme for their employees, this is considered a benefit in kind and the employee must have PAYE, PRSI and USC deducted on the benefit made by the employer. The Revenue gives tax relief to the employee on the employer contributions but this is limited to contributions up to 1000.00 per adult and 500.00 per child. This equates to 200.00 and 100.00 tax relief at source (TRS) respectively. The Revenue only requires the employer benefit in kind amount up to the maximum contribution amounts reported on the P35L plus the TRS value. Therefore, there are several figures that need to be maintained by the system. Net Medical Insurance to be paid to the insurer (obtained through 3 rd party extract reports) Medical Insurance paid by the employee Medical Insurance paid by the employer Benefit In Kind charged to the employee (Total employer benefit plus TRS value) Medical Insurance on P35L (up to the maximum amounts) To assist employers to meet this obligation, Safe EMS has been enhanced to capture this information. If users have set up medical insurance deductions prior to this enhancement, users will need to reconfigure the deduction/payment type so that the values are correctly allocated to the required recording fields for the P35L. Set up of Payments/Deductions Deduction Type A new deduction type of Medical has been added so that deductions can be distinguished from other deductions. Payment Type Although the contribution made by the employer is a benefit in kind, as the medical insurance benefit in kind needs to be distinguished separately from other benefit in kinds, a new payment type called Medical has been added. Page 7 of 21 07 October 2014
Employee Deductions When the medical insurance deduction for the employer contribution is attached to the employee, there is another field called No Medical Children on the settings tab. If the employee has children covered within their insurance, the number of children needs to be recorded to allow for the correct amount of TRS to be applied. An example of how the medical insurance would be set up for an individual is as follows: Payment/Deduction Type Description Amount per Comments month Payment Medical EE Medical BIK 136.67 Employer contribution plus TRS No of Medical Children would be zero in this case. Deduction Medical ER Medical 120.00 Cont. Medical YTD Safe EMS will process the medical insurance payment/deductions and after period close will update the medical year date figures required. Users can view the medical insurance year to date figures in the YTD Details screen by click on the Medical button. Page 8 of 21 07 October 2014
Employee Contribution YTD This field is read only and sums all the employee deductions flagged as medical deduction type for the year. Employer Contribution YTD This field is read only and sums all the employer deductions flagged as medical deduction type for the year. Total Net Contribution YTD This field is read only and is a sum of the employee contribution and employer contribution. No. of Children This field is read only and displays the entry for number of children held against the employer deduction. TRS Total This field is read only and is based on the number of children (and the employee) and the parameters held in Safe EMS for the total amount of TRS allowed in the year. Employee Medical BIK YTD This field is read only and sums all the employee payments flagged as medical payment type for the year. This is to identify the benefit in kind that the employee is being taxed, USC d and PRSI d. Page 9 of 21 07 October 2014
P35L Medical Insurance This field is modifiable. It will be pre-populated with the amount of employer contribution of medical insurance that can receive the maximum amount of tax relief for the year. Should there be any reason for users to change this, it can be updated. P35L Medical Insurance The relevant figures for Medical Insurance will be populated in the P35L and have also been added to the P35L excel report. P35L Updates Safe EMS P35L has been enhanced to display further information and to allow for supplementary and amendment submissions. The following section describes the enhancements: P35L Display of employee data Safe EMS has been enhanced to display the data that is output onto a P35L for each employee from tax year 2014. A View Details button is shown at the bottom of the screen: Page 10 of 21 07 October 2014
P35L Supplements Where employers have multiple payrolls with the same Employer Registration Number on different systems, the Revenue needs to know if the P35Ls sent are originals or supplements or amendments. This process for marking a P35L as a supplement in Safe EMS needed to be performed by Safe s Technical Support Team. Safe EMS has now been enhanced to allow users to do this themselves. P35L Procedures In the P35L Procedures screen, underneath the Function field is a new field called Return Type. This field will be displayed when users have chosen the option Print P35L and create output for ROS. There are 3 options: Original, Supplement and Amendment. If you do not have any other payroll systems that process a payroll with the same Employer Registration Number, the option you would choose is Original. If you do have multiple payroll systems that run payrolls for the same Employer Registration Number, you need to decide which payroll should be marked as the original and which are supplements (additions) to the original. If you have made a mistake on either a supplement or original P35L, correct the mistake against the worker and select the option of Amendment. This will send any amended records to the Revenue. Original P35L Once you have chosen Original, the process will be the same as previous years: it will create the appropriate documents to upload to ROS. Supplement P35L When you select Supplement, you will be taken to the following screen: Page 11 of 21 07 October 2014
Although the Irish Government has not yet implemented Parking Levy, should they ever do so, you will be required to complete the total number of employees with parking levy and the total value across all P35Ls for that Employer Registration Number. Click Finish to generate the P35L for the supplement. Amendment P35L If a mistake has been made on either an original or supplement P35L, you are able to send through an amendment P35L. It is assumed that the employee records that require amending have taken place. When Amendment is selected, users will be taken to a screen to select the records that they have amended: Page 12 of 21 07 October 2014
Once the employees have been selected, click the Next button which will take you the final screen in the process which is the same as the Supplement screen to enter any Parking Levy figures. Special Characters on P35L The Revenue only accepts limited special characters and do not have any plans to allow for names that have special characters from different nations. To avoid customers having errors in uploading statutory documents, Safe EMS will remove any special characters in the XML files that are produced. The special characters will remain in Safe EMS. P35L and multiple employments Where employees have multiple employments with an employer during the tax year, the Revenue requires the figures for all employments during the tax year to be added together. Safe EMS will check for where a PPSN number appears multiple times to gather the information to output onto the P35L as 1 entry. PAYE Refunds where there is zero pay The Revenue advises that if an employee does not receive any monies for a period a refund of PAYE should not be given. Safe EMS has been enhanced to output a warning message into the main calculation for the user to review and action as required. USC and Tax During Payment of Illness Benefit If an employee is in receipt of illness benefit and no other payment in the period, Safe EMS will now refund USC where appropriate. If the amount of tax and USC that was calculated exceeded the notional payment of Illness benefit, the total amount of tax and USC will be deducted and the payslip will display a negative net as it is the Page 13 of 21 07 October 2014
employer s obligation to pay the full amount to the Revenue. Please note that any customisation around this area has been maintained. Refunds of Tax and USC where Gross Pay is Zero Where employees are not in receipt of any gross pay, and a refund of tax or USC is detected, a warning message is output to the main calculation report has been added so that users can decide if they wish to override if the worker should receive the refund. P45 Older than Previous Year Where a P45 is older than the previous year to the current tax year, the tax code will now default to Emergency Basis and not Temporary Basis. Page 14 of 21 07 October 2014
UK Statutory Enhancements Performance on the Generation of FPS As the RTI process has now been in operation for a while and is an integral part of the payroll process, we wanted to improve the speed of the generation of the FPS. To this end we have been able to reduce the time in generating the FPS by 23%. Pension Cyclical Re-enrolment Part of employer duties relating to auto enrolment, an employer must put their eligible jobholders who are no longer in pension saving (because they chose to opt out or cease membership after the employers staging date) back in to an automatic enrolment scheme on a three yearly cycle. This is known as Cyclical Re-enrolment. With cyclical automatic re-enrolment the employer must assess any workers who opted out or ceased active membership of a qualifying scheme more than 12 months before a specific date the automatic re-enrolment date. Any workers who meet the criteria to be an eligible jobholder on that date must be automatically re-enrolled, unless they are already an active member of a qualifying scheme that the employer provides. Following automatic re-enrolment the employer is required to complete registration again with the Pensions Regulator (known as re-registration) to tell the TPR how they have discharged their automatic reenrolment duty. For those workers who do not meet the eligible jobholder criteria, the employer has no further duties until the next cyclical automatic re-enrolment, unless the worker gives the employer an opt-in or joining notice. Automatic re-enrolment will only apply to eligible jobholders who have already had an automatic enrolment date with that employer. Postponement cannot be used with automatic re-enrolment. If the eligible jobholder criteria are met by a worker on the automatic re-enrolment date, automatic reenrolment must take place. The first step for an employer is to know their Cyclical Automatic Re-enrolment date. The employer may choose this date from any date that falls within a six month window, starting three months before the third anniversary of their staging date and ending three months after that anniversary. Examples of re-enrolment windows are: Original Staging Date 01/04/2013 Earliest Re-enrolment date 01/01/2016 Latest Re-enrolment date 30/06/2016 3 year anniversary from staging date 01/04/2016 Page 15 of 21 07 October 2014
Original Staging Date 01/10/2015 Earliest Re-enrolment date 01/07/2018 Latest Re-enrolment date 31/12/2018 3 year anniversary from staging date 01/10/2018 The employer can choose when the cyclical re-enrolment date should be within the 6 month window. Pay Group Set Up In the Pay Group Maintenance screen and in the Pension tab, there is a new button called Re-enrolment. When pressed, the following screen will be displayed: During the upgrade process, the first cyclical re-enrolment date line will automatically be populated. All fields apart from Actual Reenrol Date are read-only as these display the window in which the actual Re-enrol date should fall within. The upgrade process will automatically default the Actual Re-enrol Date to the 3 year anniversary of the staging date. Users then have the opportunity to change this date that falls within the 6 month window. Users will not be able to enter a date that is prior to the current period. Page 16 of 21 07 October 2014
Main Calculation As the cyclical re-enrolment process is on an infrequent basis, employers may inadvertently forget that this process requires action. Therefore, Safe EMS will automatically check if the cyclical re-enrolment date is within the relevant pay reference period and will automatically re-assess opted out employees. A message will display in the main calculation screen, when the Proceed button is pressed: Where employees have an opted out date or withdrawal date that is less than 1 year before the actual reenrolment date, they will be considered for re-enrolment under the auto enrolment rules. If the employee status is not considered as eligible e.g. their earnings are not high enough, they will not be auto enrolled and they will not be considered for re-enrolment for another 3 years. The main calculation will then automatically populate the next row in the Pension Re-enrolment table for the next cyclical re-enrolment period. Entitled Workers Employer Contribution Where a worker has the status of entitled after the period of postponement, and if the pension scheme for auto enrolment is the same as a pension scheme used prior to auto enrolment, Safe EMS will suppress the employer contribution. If this is not the rules for your pension scheme, users can disable the suppression by unchecking the new flag in pension scheme maintenance called Supress Entitled ER Contribution. Page 17 of 21 07 October 2014
Issue Resolution The following information informs users of the issues reported that have been resolved in Safe EMS 5.09. I5222 - Pensioner Payroll and Creation of a P45 (Call Log 148813) An issue occurred where Safe EMS did not create a P45 for a pensioner in the same period the pensioner started. R7256 - Trivial Commutation (Call Log 149645) The HMRC do not accept pence against payment types of trivial commutation (these are certain types of pension payments). Therefore, additional validation in the Quality Standard Validation has been added to alert users that the pence against these payments need to be removed. R7262 - Early FPS Submissions for New Tax Year (Call Log 145488) When users were submitting FPS in their Test System, an error was occurring. This did not happen for live systems. R7265 - QSV Error (Call Log 149645) During the year end quality standard check, the error message Worker has a leave date but no P45(1) exists was being output where an employee s status was appointee. R7272 Export Message for FPS When the FPS has been generated, the message that was being displayed referred to P14s. This has now been changed to FPS. R7280 - Count of forms in PAYE Online Inbox (Call Logs 148524, 150172) When receiving forms from the HMRC in PAYE Online, General Notifications were being counted in the Inbox where they should be ignored as these are accessed via a separate screen. R7269 Duplication of GEN Forms When downloading General Notifications, a flag specifying they were received was not being set and the forms were downloaded again. E51645 NEST Extract for Prior Periods When running a NEST extract for a period prior to the current period, it was not reporting refunds correctly. E51726 DEA Report When the DEA Report is printed from the DEA report screen, users were taken back to the extract screen rather than remaining in the report screen. Safe EMS Enhancements/Fixes E51735 TPP Number Maintenance Following the introduction of SEPA support in the TPP functionality additional checks have been added to the following areas : When creating a new TPP the number is checked to ensure it is unique at the point of entry. The description field is now mandatory to add more clarity to the lookup list. If the pay method is BACS then the sort code is mandatory. Page 18 of 21 07 October 2014
The account code must be between 7 and 10 digits long and may only contain numeric characters. E51757 Data Population Wizard (Call Log 147055) The manager rating field has been added to the Data Population Wizard as a field available for import. E51762 MyView New User Email Attachments (Call Log 146565) The option is now available to attach documents to the MyView welcome email. This allows introductory guides to be included with the email advising users on the initial logon process, or general MyView use. To attach a document follow the link below the New User Email field which will open a window to allow you to select the document to be attached. In a similar manner documents can also be attached to the Password Email : Although the initial process allows a single documents to be attached to each email type, should you wish to attach multiple documents clicking the link below each prompt once the first document has been attached will open a window offering option to amend the existing document and/or attach additional documents. Page 19 of 21 07 October 2014
E51771 Calendar Workflow Trigger Filter Currently calendar activated workflow is checked at the time of record creation or when a date that will trigger the workflow is changed. Although in the majority of cases this is sufficient there are some scenarios where the change of a data field may include/exclude a data row from workflow based on a defined. For example the modification of an employee check status so that it matches the filter criteria will not activate calendar activated workflow. To resolve this scenario any changes to fields that are linked to calendar activated workflow filters will now instigate a process to either, initiate the workflow if it matches the filter, or, cancel the workflow if it falls outside the filter having previously matched. E51794 Calendar Workflow Employee Status (Call Log 149422) As calendar workflow triggers are created in advance an additional check has been added at the time of workflow activation to check that the employee is still Live, where they aren t the workflow is cancelled. This accommodates the scenario where an employee leaves between the workflow trigger being created and the workflow being activated. E51774 - TUPE Holiday Scheme Allocation (Call Log 148050) For employees that join a company under a TUPE arrangement retrospective joining dates are often entered to reflect the employee s true length of service. Where this is a number of years in the past this gives rise to a gap in holiday entitlement years under the current Safe EMS logic, and potentially a misinterpretation of the carried forward rules held against the allocated holiday scheme. As part of this release Safe EMS will create all holiday entitlement years from the employee s original start date applying carried forward rules to each new year created. As the employee is unlikely to have historical absence information on the system an adjustment to the current year will still be necessary once the new starter process is complete to provide a true opening balance. E51786 Net to Gross Calculation (Call Log 148724) Checks on the initial stages of the net to gross calculation have been relaxed so that the process doesn t terminate where the net to gross value represents a large proportion of the employees gross pay. In such Page 20 of 21 07 October 2014
circumstances the initial target gross figure is estimated based on known gross taxable pay from other payment elements and the indicative tax liability. Rather than attempt to calculate with rebate tax values Safe EMS now estimates the gross figure in broad figure and utilises the iterative calculation process to arrive at the final gross payment value. E51788 Allow Negative Offset (Call Log 149441) Correction to the calculation of offsets to ensure that the Allow Negative Offset flag is considered. E51789 Deletion of Overlapping Absence (Call Log 149328) More robust checks have been added to absence entry process to ensure that absence dates do not partially overlap with each other. This has resulted in some situations where overlapping absences exist with partial absence records where one or the other is deleted. In addition to the check to stop new records being created with an overlap the deletion process has been enhanced to only delete absence detail for the none overlapping period. E51790 Irish Specific Payments/Deductions (Call Log 149290) Additional validation has been added to employee payment/deduction maintenance forms to stop Irish specific payment/deduction records being allocated to employees in a UK based pay group. E51770 Expense Costing Calculation (Call Log 147468) A correction has been made to the expense costing process to accommodate costing translation definitions that utilise the Job Location field. E51780 Import of Pension Schemes As the Interface Utility does not set the Contribution Date for an imported employee pension scheme the AE assessment process can under some circumstances create additional user total records. The AE routine has been enhanced to recognize this scenario and bypass the user total generation accordingly. Page 21 of 21 07 October 2014