In a February news story, we covered the HMRC announcement that employers will not incur penalties for delays of up to three days in filing PAYE information under Real Time Information (RTI). Late payment penalties will continue to be reviewed on a risk-assessed basis rather than be issued automatically.

Under RTI, HMRC introduced penalties for employers who report their payroll information late from:

• 6 October 2014 for employers with 50 or more employees
• 6 March 2015 for employers with fewer than 50 employees

The previous announcement gave no specific end date for the “up to three days” relaxation, although HMRC did note that a consultation into penalties more generally was ongoing and that following its completion they would “review the operation of the changes to the PAYE penalties by 5 April 2016”.

HMRC guidance on “What happens if you don’t report payroll information on time” has now been updated. This clearly states as follows:-

“HMRC won’t charge a penalty if:

• your FPS is late but all reported payments on the FPS are within 3 days of your employees’ payday (this applies from 6 March 2015 to 5 April 2016)…”

It appears, therefore, that the 3 day relaxation may be time limited until 5 April 2016.

Readers are also reminded that the 2014/15 deadline for final PAYE returns in respect of most PAYE schemes was 19 May last. Employers should have submitted an employer payment summary by that date if:

• they didn’t insert ‘Yes’ in the ‘Final submission for year’ field in the last full payment submission (FPS), or
• no one was paid in the final pay period of the tax year, or
• the final FPS was submitted early and no one was paid for one or more subsequent full tax months in the last tax year.

If an employer hasn’t done a final return but the above situations don’t apply, then an earlier year update should be submitted.

Employees must also have been given their 2014/15 form P60 by the end of May 2015. The deadline for forms P11D and P9D is also approaching. These must be submitted to HMRC and the information therein given to employees by 6 July 2015 with any associated Class 1A NIC payable by 19 July (if paying by cheque) or 22 July (if paying electronically).