COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

Think small and you will undoubtedly get left behind. The increasingly global nature of business means organisations must look beyond the local or even national boundary.

What do you think of the PAYE review published yesterday? It’s pretty radical stuff to feed all employee data to HMRC each pay period from April 2012 and from 2015 move to HMRC calculating tax and NICs.

Your business is only as good as your people – it is a commonly used and accepted adage. But in the case of your own organisation, is it actually true?

There is little point investing in internal staff if you are going to cut workers at the earliest sign of a downturn. Training and employing staff is a costly process and it is surely remiss to write off such investment.

According to Government sources, Iain Duncan-Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary is about to split the DWP into two separate departments, one looking after welfare and one dealing with pensions. DWP has the biggest budget in Whitehall and has been restructured frequently in recent years. It was created in 2001 from the Department of Social Security which until 1988 had the health brief too, and despite this happening over thirty years ago, lots of people still refer to DWP as the DHSS!

Sometimes the most innocuous sounding announcement can have a big impact. Steve Webb, the new Pensions Minister, threw a lifeline to final salary pension schemes in the private sector recently by allowing them to amend their scheme rules to use the lower Consumer Pries Index (CPI) to uprate their pensions in payment and deferred or preserved pensions rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI ).

HMRC’s Share Schemes Services Unit have written to their customers outlining the reduced level of support that they can expect as the annual share returns are about to be submitted – to the same deadline as P11Ds.

In its latest newsletter to stakeholders, HMRC’s David Ellis is very clear about the current service standards that employers can expect from the department, and one would suspect that with more budget cuts to come, this will become business as usual.

One year on from the debacle of the Student Loans Company’s (SLC) handling of loans to last year’s intake of graduates, Business Minister Vince Cable has put forward a novel way to solve the problem and at the same time cut more public sector jobs – scrap the SLC and introduce a graduate tax instead.

The Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) that has been dogged with controversy since its inception is yet again under review by the Home Secretary, Theresa May. She has called for a ‘common sense’ review that will see the registration of individuals with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), that was due to begin on 26 July, now on hold. Employers will therefore find themselves in limbo as some of the reforms that went live in October 2009 are unchanged whilst new systems have to go live on 26 July, albeit with some modification.

New Pensions Minister Steve Webb has published the promised review of the scope of auto-enrolment into the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) workplace pension that is due to be rolled out from October 2012 onwards.