There’s Nothing Automatic About It!

The headaches faced by employers struggling with the Government's flagship pension reforms have received widespread national media coverage in recent weeks. At its simplest, automatic enrolment requires certain workers to be automatically placed into a pension scheme and provided with mandatory pension contributions.

Many employers could be forgiven for underestimating the challenges of these reforms, which are being introduced for different employers at different times, with larger employers coming under new laws before smaller employers. The mistake that some employers have made is to simply see automatic enrolment, as an accounting item, something to be factored into projected staffing costs over the coming years. Although it is right to take account of this cost, the real price lies in administration.