Sharky & George

Once we took over the payroll, the main issues identified were:

1. Pension assessments
Auto enrolment assessments had not been carried out correctly.

• Assessments were inconsistent across months
• Some employees would be assessed one month but not the next
• In some months, all employees were assessed
• In other months, no assessments were carried out at all

This had been happening across two tax years on a hit-and-miss basis.

2. Expenses
The client had been advised by their previous provider that expenses were tax free
regardless of value.

• No checks were being made for receipts
• Flat rate expenses were being paid above HMRC thresholds
• No validation of whether payments should be treated as taxable or not

We carried out a full review of the payroll from when the previous provider took over.

• Identified all affected employees
• Reviewed payroll data across both tax years
• Documented all issues

With over 200 employees, this process took approximately 3 days to complete.

We agreed a timeline and plan to compete the work and our contact at S&G made themselves available to answer questions as they arose.

We setup a tracker which was made available in a shared folder for the client to monitor progress.

We determined the most effective way to correct the issues was to rebuild the payroll from the point the errors began.

• Set up a new payroll 
• Reprocessed each month using the original earnings data (salary, overtime, bonuses, etc.), as the gross pay itself was correct.
• Corrected the treatment of pensions and expenses in the software and carried out checks to ensure that everything was being processed correctly as we moved through each pay period.

Once the rebuild was complete:

• The new payroll was fully checked and validated again.
• We now had two payrolls: 
  • One with the original (incorrect) figures 
  • One with the corrected figures 

This allowed us to run reports from both and calculate the differences accurately.