Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme Claims

HMRC have recently issued further changes to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and information about what you will need to have ready before the system goes live on April 20th.

The changes regarding employee eligibility are these:

• you can claim for employees that were employed as of 19 March 2020 and were on your PAYE payroll on or before that date; this means that you will have made an RTI submission notifying them of payment of that employee on or before 19 March 2020
• employees that were employed as of 28 February 2020 and on payroll (i.e. notified to us on an RTI submission on or before 28 February) and were made redundant or stopped working for you after that, and prior to 19 March 2020, can also qualify for the scheme if you re-employ them and put them on furlough.

How to claim

You will need to be aware of the following:

• the online claim service will be launched on GOV.UK on 20 April 2020 – please do not try to access it before this date as it won’t be available
• the only way to make a claim is online – the service should be simple to use and any support you need available on GOV.UK; this will include help with calculating the amount you can claim
• you can make the claim yourself even if you usually use an agent
• claims will be paid within 6 working days; you should not contact them unless it is absolutely necessary – any queries should be directed to your agent, representative or their webchat service
• they cannot answer any queries from employees – they will need to raise these with you, as their employer, directly.

Information you will need before you make a claim

You will need to have the following before claims open on 20 April 2020:

• a Government Gateway (GG) ID and password – if you don’t already have a GG account, you can apply for one online
• be enrolled for PAYE online – if you aren’t registered yet, you can do so now
• the following information for each furloughed employee you will be claiming for:
  • Name
  • National Insurance number
  • Claim period and claim amount
  • PAYE/employee number (optional)
• if you have fewer than 100 furloughed staff you will need to input information directly into the system for each employee
• if you have 100 or more furloughed staff you will need to upload a file with information for each employee; they will accept the following file types: .xls .xlsx .csv .ods.

If you want an agent to act for you for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme

• agents authorised to act for you on PAYE matters can make the claim on your behalf using their ID and password
• you will need to tell your agent which UK bank account you want the grant to be paid into, in order to ensure funds are paid as quickly as possible to you.

You should retain all records and calculations in respect of your claims for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

We are helping all our payroll clients to make claims but are anticipating some challenges in accessing the HMRC systems on the start date as there are going to be several million employees applying through what is a brand new system.