Employers are responsible for selecting the appropriate AE pension scheme for their employees.
Employers are free to choose any qualifying pension scheme that is willing to accept their custom in order to comply with their automatic enrolment duties.
The Pensions Regulator told the DWP Select Committee that selecting a scheme is one of the most significant challenges for smaller employers:
Concerns include finding a scheme that will accept them, ensuring they make the best choice of scheme for their employees, addressing the risk of challenge from their staff if the scheme is not well run, and making sure that the scheme they choose works with their payroll software.
For the smaller employer, reliant upon their payroll bureau or external accountant, there is a distinct lack of clarity regarding where a potential liability for “advice” would fall.
http://www.pensionplaypen.com has devised a process that provides that clarity. Our choose a pension service (CAP) allows payroll data, analysed using our proprietary workforce assessment, to address the challenge of workplace pension selection.
We provide clarity to employer and business adviser about “who is doing what” so that it’s clear who is taking the decision and on what basis.
Follow the progress of the decision making process through the rest of this blog.
When you have finished , why not register at http://www.pensionplaypen.com, either as an employer, an employer’s agent or both!
Who does what in choosing a workplace pension?
You-“Andy” the business adviser- have loaded your client’s data into the workforce assessment tool. You now have the chance to hand over to your client.
All you have to do is press the “share enquiry” button that appears at the top of every screen of the choose a pension service.
You can share when you choose, but you must hand over to your client the decision to choose the pension. If you choose the pension for your client you put your client in breech of the regulations.
Stage one – you decide to share this enquiry and hand over to your client.
You press “learn more”.
Stage two – Showing you how to introduce your client to the process
You press “send”
Stage three – confirmation you’ve shared your enquiry with your client
Stage four – what your client (John Doe- the employer) sees
Stage five- your client (John Doe) presses continue and is briefed on what’s going on
Stage six – making sure he’s really John Doe who you say you are!
John completes the boxes which must match the details you’ve input at stage two.
Stage seven – the handover is completed when John Doe registers
From now on, John is in charge of choosing his workplace pension.
In terms of responsibilities, the business adviser has done the technical work needed to complete the workforce assessment. The numbers have been crunched and indicative costs provided to John.
Now it’s up to John to answer a few straightforward questions about his business, look at his options and take a business decision about which workplace pension to choose.
Why this is so easy (and so hard)
The business of choosing a workplace pension is incredibly easy. From an operational point of view, it only requires an employer to click a few times and he’s into “scheme set up” with a variety of employers.
Increasingly, Pension PlayPen is embedded into the AE processes of many software suppliers and is becoming the process of choice among accountants and other business advisers, helping their clients choose a pension.
It is just so easy to use http://www.pensionplaypen.com but that’s because we have plenty of practice. Nearly 3,500 employers have already taken the journey and joined a workplace pension provider using our choose a pension service.
Practice (nearly) makes perfect! We know that we could make the journey even easier but we don’t (yet) know how. By the time we reach our target (100,000 users) by the end of the initial staging period, we hope to be the nearest thing to heaven you can use.
Right now just follow these seven steps and we’ll take you to the pearly gates!
