Feb 2015
23
Automatic Enrolment and Postponement
When a company reaches its staging date, it must automatically enrol all eligible employees into a qualifying pension scheme.
If it is not ready to enrol employees at the staging date, it can defer the enrolment of all employees for up to 3 months. This may be because it has not yet registered with a pension scheme or it may be because it doesn't have the necessary systems in place to handle assessments and contributions.
An essential part of postponement is communicating with all employees within 6 weeks of the staging date, letting them know that automatic enrolment has been deferred. If the company fails to issue these communications then postponement will never have happened and auto enrolment must be applied retrospectively to the staging date.
This is important as apparently some employers are interpreting postponement as not having to do anything for a 3 month period!
BrightPay prompts the user to print these letters before proceeding beyond the staging date.
