The Government have today, 15th April 2020, announced further updates to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.
The main changes include:
Change of Payroll date to 19 March 2020
Previously, any employee eligible to be furloughed must have been on the employer’s PAYE payroll date on or before 28 February 2020. With the changes announced today, employers can now claim for furloughed employees that were employed and on their PAYE payroll on or before 19 March 2020. This means that the employee must have been notified to HMRC through an RTI submission notifying payment in respect of that employee on or before 19 March 2020, in other words, data must have been physically submitted to HMRC by 19 March.
Details of how to submit claim information
The Government have provided some information to allow employers to start to pull their claims together now prior to submitting them. Employers who are furloughling less than 100 employees will have to key each individual claim together with the required information, whereas employers who are furloughing in excess of 100 employees will be able to submit a spreadsheet in any of the following formats: .xls .xlsx .csv .ods. See below for information required when making a claim.
Details of the exact claiming mechanism is still awaited but the Government state they are still on course to be able to process claims from Monday 20 April 2020.
What information is required when making a claim
For the sake of completeness we have set out below what you will require when making your claim for furlough support:
• your employer PAYE reference number
• the number of employees being furloughed
• National Insurance Numbers for the furloughed employees
• Names of the furloughed employees
• Payroll/employee number for the furloughed employees (optional)
• your Self Assessment Unique Taxpayer Reference or Corporation Tax Unique Taxpayer Reference or Company Registration Number
• the claim period (start and end date)
• amount claimed (per the minimum length of furloughing of 3 consecutive weeks)
• your bank account number and sort code
• your contact name
• your phone number
HMRC have specifically highlighted within their guidance that they are unable to discuss exact details of furlough claims with employees and instead, employers should aim to keep their employees as up to date as possible.
