Automatic enrolment – record keeping

This is the fifth and final post in a series of short blogs about automatic enrolment, a new law designed to encourage people to save for their retirement.

1 – When is my staging date?

2 – What about my existing pension scheme?

3 – Registering your qualifying pension scheme

4 – Communicating with employees

Auto enrolment will require all employers to enrol their employees into a workplace pension scheme, if they are not already a member of a qualifying scheme.

It is designed to overcome the perennial problem of employees not joining their workplace pension schemes when these are offered, simply because they do not sign up to receive these valuable benefits.

Record keeping

Once auto enrolment has been introduced, employers will need to keep a lot of detailed information to demonstrate their compliance with the various duties and obligations.

Records must be kept for at least six years, or four years in the case of records relating to opt out decisions. If requested by The Pensions Regulator, these records must be capable of being produced.

Because the rules on record keeping for auto enrolment are quite detailed, it is worth visiting The Pensions Regulator website at www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/employers/detailed-guidance.

In simple terms, the records will need to include things such as name, national insurance number, date of birth, address, gross earnings, date notice was sent to each worker and their enrolment date.

Some of this information might already be kept by employers as part of their existing payroll process. Where other information is required by the auto enrolment rules, employers should create a plan to ensure it is captured and stored properly.

Your fifth auto enrolment task is to review the record keeping requirements from The Pensions Regulator, check which records you already keep and make a plan to capture and store the other required information.