COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

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.

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 ).

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.

The facts are straightforward and unavoidable: the modern reliance of business and consumers on technology means the amount of information we produce continues to increase.

Does anyone out there feel its time that the balance got redressed a little when government departments make a mistake? We heard last week that HMRC had ‘inadvertently’ sent out tax credit notices with other claimants’ personal details attached as the pages had been collated in the wrong order.

All eyes will be on the Chancellor as he delivers his budget on 24th March. His economic forecasts will be of particular interest. Although we’re now out of recession, everyone wants to know how long it will be until we can give a collective sigh of relief. Grant Thornton predicts economic growth to be around 2 ½ % for 2011 – lower than the Chancellor’s forecast of 3 ¼ to 3 ¾ % and so there is still someway to go.

Guest blogger Phil Hawthorn continues his look at Time Management and highlights the key points that were covered at the recent COA Solutions eFinancials Annual National User Conference and offers a selection of practical time management tips

Its been a big week for the COA Solutions HCM team this week. Firstly, they brought together all HCM customers for the first time at one venue for the COA Solutions HCM User Group.

Today Base Rate is 5%. So what? LIBOR (the rate Banks are supposed to lend to each other) is 6.0% for one year and a one year Gilt earns 4.6% p.a. Drawings by the Banks under the emergency funding scheme are at 4.6% – so who gets or pays Base Rate?