PAYE Date and Furlough

RJHowells1

My husband started his new job and contract on the 28th February. Does this mean PAYE will be the same date and is he therefore covered. His company want to furlough him, but are not sure what this PAYE date means until the portal comes through from the government. Does an admin input mean the difference of my husband being on Furlough? His contact and start date is the 28th February. This seems to be a grey and worrying area.

Thanks for any help.

sharpe106

All it says so far is they have to be on the payroll. So until the actually system comes up nobody actually knows. 

Gonna-be-debt-free

It shouldn't have anything to do with admin input.  Guidance so far has been that the person should have been employed "on the payroll" on or before 28th February.  In normal payroll, accounting, and business terms that would mean contracted to start on or before that date, and due to be paid for work performed from the date of contract start.  It shouldn't have anything to do with the date that a first wage payment was made or the date that the HR admin input the record.  However, to avoid fraudulent claims it would be sensible to expect companies to prove that the contract was signed before the 29th, and the employee actually showed up for work.

Jeremy535897

Gonna-be-debt-free said:

It shouldn't have anything to do with admin input.  Guidance so far has been that the person should have been employed "on the payroll" on or before 28th February.  In normal payroll, accounting, and business terms that would mean contracted to start on or before that date, and due to be paid for work performed from the date of contract start.  It shouldn't have anything to do with the date that a first wage payment was made or the date that the HR admin input the record.  However, to avoid fraudulent claims it would be sensible to expect companies to prove that the contract was signed before the 29th, and the employee actually showed up for work.

I'm not so sure. Being on the payroll at 28 February 2020 seems to be key to the scheme, because it will be strong independent evidence that the employee was hired before the job retention scheme was announced. It would be in both the paying company's interest and the employee's interest to manage to produce a contract signed on 28 February, so even if there genuinely is one, I doubt it will be relevant. I suspect the evidence that will count is the date the RTI full payment submission was made in respect of the new employee, and that can be done up to and including the date that the first wage is paid.

gary83

Gonna-be-debt-free said:

It shouldn't have anything to do with admin input.  Guidance so far has been that the person should have been employed "on the payroll" on or before 28th February.  In normal payroll, accounting, and business terms that would mean contracted to start on or before that date, and due to be paid for work performed from the date of contract start.  It shouldn't have anything to do with the date that a first wage payment was made or the date that the HR admin input the record.  However, to avoid fraudulent claims it would be sensible to expect companies to prove that the contract was signed before the 29th, and the employee actually showed up for work.

This isn’t a normal situation though, this is an unprecedented scheme that was unimaginable to most of us even at the start of March, I think the chancellor has made it very clear several times why the 28th of February is important to him, purely from a fraud prevention point and HMRC will be going back and checking their database, it’s the RTI entry that matters, not emails, contracts, letters or anything else that could easily be created with a different date. 

https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1246085849042898945?s=20