RTI for Seasonal Workers

Have you taken on casual workers this summer? Perhaps you are paying piece-rates for the amount of produce picked or packed by each person. Reporting such small and variable payments under the new RTI system is a significant hassle.

The RTI rules require you to report each payment to workers on or before the date of the payment. Fortunately you may be able to use one of these two concessions to ease your RTI reporting burden:

a) Where you pay your causal workers daily or more than once a week, but the amounts paid are less than £109 per person per week, you can send RTI reports to HMRC weekly; or

b) Where the total number of your employees, including casual workers, is less than 50, you can send your RTI reports to HMRC on a monthly basis.

Concession b) will only apply for payments made before 6 April 2014.

Your casual workers are likely to have no set working hours for each week. In effect they will be on a zero-hours contract; paid for the hours they work, but otherwise not at all. In such cases you should choose option D of hours worked on the FPS report under RTI.

The Government wants employers to report data on the hours worked by employees in order to prevent fraud in the Tax Credits system. Under Universal Credit the hours worked will not be relevant to the employee's claim, so in time when all claimants are moved from Tax Credits to Universal Credit, the requirement to report hours worked should be dropped.