PAYE Modernisation - What software

Stratvs

Sandra Thundering Lodge wrote: »

The amount of interaction from revenue was to roll out this new process on an unprecedented scale with an arbitrary cut off date, hold on a few seminars around the country and in classic revenue style basically put the responsibility on the employers and their accountants.

The PMOD concept was initially flagged in Oct 2016 I believe. Over the following 2 years we've had Revenue seminars ( which in fairness weren't great ), webinars and newsletters by the payroll software providers, Revenue letters to employers, Revenue phone calls to employers and physical callouts by Revenue staff to employers checking their readiness for 0/01/19. Some accountants will also have been spending time with clients on this as to what was coming and in cases helping them with the transition.

I absolutely agree that Revenue's approach is often to say, this is what's happening, it's your problem to deal with it and we'll penalise you if you don't. The payroll providers have also had what must have been a huge headache and cost to deal with this. But we've had 2 years to get ready for this matter. At this point if there are employers who haven't interacted with Revenue, I'm not sure what they can do but follow up non filers to see what's going on.

FWIW since 01/01/19 everything I've had to do with the new payroll & ROS filing has worked perfectly with no need for calls to tech support or Revenue. Apart from my digital cert being kicked out of the payroll once but once I reloaded it all was grand again. So someone must have done something right.

collsoft

Hi Stratvs,

I agree, we have been working closely with Revenue for about 18 months, and it has been the best engagement that we have ever had as an industry with Revenue.

They were very responsive to our requests, but as is usual not everything went our way.

Revenue tend to have a very "Black & White" view of things - I guess that you can afford to have this when you can write the regulations to suit yourself.

Our experience is more around the human error side of things - people make mistakes because they don't know the regulations.

I think that Revenue could have done a much better job at explaining things to Employers. Take for example the "Employers Guide".

Revenue only published the 141 page Employers Guide for PMOD on 10th December 2018 - this should have been available to employers 6 months before the rollout to give people time to read it.

It also contains mistakes.

For example you wont find anything in there about "Employment IDs" - the document still refers to "X" and "T" PPS Numbers which no longer exists and which have been replace by Employment IDs.

Anybody who has fallen foul of the "Duplicate RPN" problem will tell you what a pain it has been and it all comes down to not knowing what an Employment ID is.

I would also argue that Revenue should have sent each employer a PAYE Modernisation Information pack to try and get them to prepare - but they didn't.

But I would also close by saying that generally PMOD has been very successful - the number of submissions is very large and people are getting used to the new system slowly but surely.