Despite more than 4 million firms already having signed up to auto-enrolment there is a growing concern that some firms are becoming complacent and could face hefty fines for failing to join up.<\/p>\n
Financial experts have warned that a number of SME s in the UK are \u2018sleep-walking\u2019 towards a pensions disaster – as thousands risk missing legally binding.<\/p>\n
New research from solicitor\u2019s Irwin Mitchell reported that high numbers of the 12,000 or so businesses, with between 62 and 89 employees, which were supposed to begin auto-enrolment on 1 July this year took up their right to ask for a three-month extension.<\/p>\n
And that many of those companies subsequently missed last week\u2019s final deadline and are now open to fines from the Pensions Regulator.<\/p>\n
Speaking in the Independent, the Financial Columnist, David Prosser, said that the extended roll-out to smaller businesses made sense, but that the first 18 months in which only large companies had to meet the requirements, has left some smaller companies with a false sense of security.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThese businesses have found it painless to make the transition to the new rules, so the assumption has been that everyone else would too.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut hundreds of thousands of small businesses are now reaching their deadlines to begin complying with auto-enrolment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fines for not meeting auto-enrolment can be quite harsh and include fines that increase the longer non-compliance continues, threats of legal action against offenders, and even criminal prosecution in the worst cases.<\/p>\n
Mr Prosser said that SMEs needed to roll-up their sleeves and get on with the task sooner rather than later in order to avoid any chance of being penalised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite more than 4 million firms already having signed up to auto-enrolment there is a growing concern that some firms are becoming complacent and could face hefty fines for failing to join up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}