Auto enrolment has meant more employers have now reached their staging date and thousands more will be staging in the next year. You may have chosen your pension provider, enrolled your employees and started to make the payments. This will now be an ongoing administrative process. However, your auto enrolment duties do not end there. You must complete a declaration of compliance with The Pensions Regulator (TPR) to confirm you have met your duties.
All employers with one or more staff have a legal requirement to complete a declaration of compliance. Even if you have only one employee who does not want to be in a pension scheme, you still have to enrol them into a scheme before they can ask to opt out and you will still be required to complete the declaration of compliance. Each employer has a deadline to complete and submit their declaration which falls 5 months after their staging date. If postponement has been used a declaration cannot be completed until after the postponement period has ended, but you can start the declaration in good time and save your progress and return to it at a later date.
The declaration is a secure online form. You will need to register with the Government Gateway as an employer, if you haven’t already, before you can complete a declaration of compliance. Once you have all the relevant information to hand it should take around 15 minutes to complete. There is a useful checklist of the information you will need to complete the declaration which you can download here. If you do not complete the declaration within 5 months of your staging date, the TPR are likely to take action which could lead to a fine.
