Pensions auto-enrolment Ireland webinar

Yes, the deduction is percentage based so if gross pay fluctuates from pay period to pay period, so too will the amount to be deducted. Note the definition of Gross Pay is “Gross Pay is the employee’s total pay of any kind before any deductions are made by the employer. It includes all notional pay and share based remuneration and is the amount of pay before any pension contributions or salary sacrifice deductions are made."

For clients who are availing of the Zellis Managed Service then the Zellis team will retrieve the AEPNs directly from NAERSA. Letters for employees concerning new enrolments or re-enrolments will be generated by the Zellis Managed Service team and issued to the client for distribution to employees. If the client is a SaaS client i.e. only uses the Zellis payroll system but not a managed service, then the client will run the process on the Zellis software to retrieve the AEPN details from NAERSA.

If the new employee is coming from another company and has been working in Ireland for more than 13 weeks, then they will be immediately enrolled as NAERSA will use a 13-week lookback period to assess eligibility. If the employee is working in Ireland for the first time, then there will be a lead-in period to enrolment, 13 weeks to allow for sufficient history to accumulate ahead of assessment. Note that this is the current steer from NAERSA.

Yes, as long as there are values for either employee or employer contributions on the payroll submissions to Revenue, that are sent following each payroll run, then that indicates to NAERSA that the employee is a member of a supplemental pension scheme and therefore does not meet the criteria for enrolment.

There is only one means of avoiding the requirement as things stand and that is to mandate membership of your company pension scheme for all existing employees and future new starters. That may require that old contracts (an addendum perhaps) and new (new insert) are adjusted to cover off the mandatory membership requirement. Also bear in mind that for new joiners, they would need to be established as members of the pensions scheme immediately following joining to avoid a scenario where NAERSA detects no company pension scheme contributions on payroll submissions and then auto-enrols the individual.

This would be best discussed with your pension administrators or providers as there would be a clause within the scheme rules to cover this. In general contributions become a "preserved benefit" after two years and refunds generally are not possible. Within 2 years the company scheme rules will state whether contributions can be refunded or not. None of this has a bearing on how pension auto-enrolment will work but if you did wish to consider a change to the rules of the company pension scheme then this would be best discussed with your pension provider.

If the employee is currently in a pension scheme where the employer is making a contribution, and the employee is not then the employee will not be enrolled in the state scheme. Once enrolled in the state scheme then employee and employer rates will be advised by NAERSA with no room for manipulation. So, employees and employers will both pay 1.5% for 3 years, 3% for 3 years, 4.5% for 3 years and then 6% from year 10.

It's unlikely that this will be the case with auto-enrolment as the Bill is comprehensive and the proposed changes are of such a scale, likely to impact more than the anticipated 800-850K employees, that this will be tightly regulated with robust guidelines for employers.

The method of establishing eligibility based on earnings is described as follows by the Dept of Social Protection "NAERSA will use Revenue payroll data to identify eligible employees, using a lookback period of up to 13 weeks. If the lookback period indicates that your earnings would exceed €20,000 over a 12-month period, you will be auto-enrolled. You will stay enrolled even if your earnings later drop below €20,000" Note that if the employee has more than one employment then earnings from both, combined gross, will be assessed.

It would appear that most payroll providers will levy a charge on users to develop the new facilities. Currently Zellis does not intend on levying a development charge but if clients wish to avail of our proposed Technical Enablement Service or AE Managed Service then a charge would apply for the provision of these services.

The re-enrolment date is based on the anniversary as things stand. So, if an employee opts out on Feb 1st 2025 then they are due to be re-enrolled on Feb 1st 2027.

As part of our AE design our Product Team are considering several options as alternatives to the production of letters for employees. One of these is the development of an alert using our notification technology for those who currently have this functionality deployed.

The company pension contributions, employee and employer values, are included in each payroll submission to Revenue. Revenue share this data with NAERSA. If the employee contributes pension contributions on the first payroll run, then this will be detected by NAERSA and they will not meet the criteria for enrolment. The guidelines currently state that if the employee (new starter) has been working for the past 13 weeks and is not in the company pension scheme then they will be "immediately enrolled". There is no clear definition of what immediate means here, but it is assumed that this will be following the first payroll run for the new starter as only then can NAERSA determine whether the employee is paying into a company pension scheme.

Any pay that contributes to gross pay for the purposes of reporting to Revenue via payroll submissions will be included in the figure, irrespective of whether this payment is taxable or not. The definition of gross pay is as follows ""Gross Pay is the employee’s total pay of any kind before any deductions are made by the employer. It includes all notional pay and share based remuneration and is the amount of pay before any pension contributions or salary sacrifice deductions are made." If a contractor is on the payroll, is a PAYE employee and is currently returned on payroll submissions to Revenue then unless he or she is contributing to a company pension scheme or PRSA scheme through payroll then he/she will meet the criteria for enrolment. However, do bear in mind that 13 weeks in continuous employment is required in order for NAERSA to make its determinations on gross pay. If the contractor doesn't have 13 weeks continuous employment, then there may be a delay in he/she becoming enrolled in the new scheme but the process will trigger once the required weeks are resident on the Revenue system.

There will be an additional cost for the provision of the AE administration service. Please contact Zellis for more details.