Intermediaries will be blamed if companies fail in their auto-enrolment duties, according to Creative Auto-enrolment.
David White, managing director of the auto-enrolment consultancy firm, said changes to auto-enrolment procedures could give employers a false sense of security and any resulting implementation errors may be blamed on advisers.
“If firms get this wrong, the intermediaries will be in the firing line. It’s a bit blunt, but intermediaries need to take control or lose control,” he says.
Extending the joining window for auto-enrolment from four to six weeks could give the impression of employers having more time to set up their scheme, he said, which is a potentially damaging message when so many companies have staging dates in the first half of 2014.
It is widely expected that there will be an auto-enrolment rush next year. Of the 38,000 companies that have staging dates next year, around 36,000 of those fall in the first six months.
“If you don’t get your clients in someone’s queue to cope with this demand, someone else will and your relationship is threatened,” Mr White said. “If you don’t get them in the queue and someone else doesn’t, they will get fined and that will threaten your relationship.”
Mr White said Creative Auto-enrolment is receiving “a distress call a week…and that’s rapidly becoming a distress call a day”.
Research commissioned by the consultancy and carried out by the Centre for Economic Business Research showed that it can take up to 103 business days to implement auto-enrolment. However, Mr White said he is receiving calls from employers with staging dates within one and three months who have done nothing to start the process, suggesting that companies are starting to slip through the net already.
