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You may find yourself in a situation where you no longer need to operate a payroll under your current PAYE scheme. This may be because you’ve closed your business, or have sold it and are going through a TUPE transfer arrangement.
There are some steps you need to take to make sure that HMRC are aware that you no longer operate this PAYE scheme, so you don’t receive any unwanted fines for non submission of RTI files!
What do you need to do?
1. Mark all employees as leavers
You can’t cease a PAYE scheme if there are live employees, so all of them need to be terminated and issued with a P45
Head to our How to Terminate an Employee article if you need any more help with this
2. Mark the cessation date on the FPS
Once you have processed your last payroll under this PAYE scheme, you need to mark that it is the final one for the scheme.
You also need to make sure that you mark that the scheme is ceasing, and enter the date the scheme ceased, so HMRC know to expect no further submissions and close the scheme at their end too.
Once you have processed the last payroll in Pento, please contact our support team who will be able to assist you with marking your last FPS as ‘final’ and ‘ceased’.
Do I need to do anything different if this is a TUPE arrangement?
In terms of your current PAYE scheme, you will still need to complete steps 1 and 2 above.
You may not want to issue a P45 to your employees, as this may cause concern with them, but you will need to provide these to the person operating the payroll for the PAYE scheme to which they are transferring.
If you are operating a PAYE scheme for employees who have joined as part of a TUPE transfer you must make sure their continuous employment date should be reported on the FPS as their start date for the original company, and their start date in the new company should be held in a date joined field. This is to ensure that they still have the relevant length of service held against their record to ensure they are entitled to statutory benefits and redundancy pay if applicable.
Please contact our Support Team here at Pento who will be able to assist you with this.