Making Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) claims

Following on from earlier blogs regarding the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme claims, HMRC have advised that the portal, through which claims will be made, will go live on 20 April 2020.

If you wish to submit the claims yourself

If you plan to submit the claim yourself, you will need to be able to access your PAYE online account (see instructions at the foot of this blog). The current guidelines state that you will need the following information to make the claim:

• your employer PAYE reference number
• the number of employees being furloughed
• National Insurance numbers for the employees you want to furlough
• Names of the employees you want to furlough
• Payroll/works number for the employees you want to furlough
• 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

If we deal with your payroll you will be able to find a lot of this information on the payroll myepaywindow portal:-

https://www.myepaywindow.com/

If you need our assistance with any of this information we would ask you to understand that our staff are very busy trying to help everyone at this time and if we are inundated with queries on the above our response time will be slower than normal.  We know how important these claims are to our clients, so we urge everyone to think ahead and start to pull this information together as soon as possible rather than leaving this until the last minute. 

We understand that HMRC will release a calculator for Employers to use to make any claims on 20 April 2020.

Clients who wish our assistance to submit their claims

We also recognise that a lot of clients will want us to make the claims and from last week’s latest HMRC guidance, we believe this will now be possible.  We await further confirmation on this and full details of what is involved but we are trying to plan to ensure we turn everything round as efficiently as possible when the time comes. We are happy to assist both our current payroll and non payroll clients with this exercise and have already emailed our payroll clients about this. 

However, if we do not currently process your payroll, we will need to get a mandate in place to assist you.  Please note that this process can currently take up to 10 days or potentially longer depending on current HMRC workloads and the post. If you are a non payroll client and wish our assistance to make your claim, we would therefore recommend that you speak to us as soon as possible so we can give you a fee quote for this work and get the necessary paperwork put in place.

Please do not send queries on the claims portal to our payroll team.  Please firstly direct any queries to your normal Johnston Smillie contact.  We are very much here to help all our clients, but as you can imagine our payroll team are very busy carrying out the tax year-end routines as well as processing a lot of Furloughed employee claims and their normal payroll processing work.

PAYE Online account

If you do NOT already have a PAYE online account, we suggest that you set one up as soon as possible using the link below.

https://www.gov.uk/paye-online/enrol

You will need your PAYE reference and Accounts office reference to do this. Please note that you will also need these references if you make your actual CRJS claim so you may wish to keep a note of these.

If you are a current payroll client, you can find both these references in the myePayWindow portal where we post your payroll reports:-

https://www.myepaywindow.com/

The references are at the top right hand side of the relevant reports.  The name of the relevant report depends on whether you pay your PAYE and NIC monthly or quarterly:-

• Monthly payments  – PAP32TSL
• Quarterly payments – PAP32QSL

Note your tax office reference is the 3 digits at the beginning of your PAYE reference.  So if your PAYE reference is 961/1234567 your tax office reference is 961.

If you have already set up a PAYE online account AND you did this a while ago,  we would recommend that you log on to this to make sure that your log in credentials still work or if you need to request your Government gateway ID or reset your password,

https://www.gov.uk/paye-online

The information in this blog provides only an overview of HMRC guidance and legislation in force at the date of publication and no action should be taken without consulting the detailed HMRC guidance and legislation or seeking professional advice.  Therefore no responsibility for loss occasioned by any person acting or refraining from action as a result of the material contained in this blog can be accepted by the firm

 

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash