Further to our correspondence last week regarding the grant reclaim for furloughed workers we have sought clarification from HMRC as to whether we are able to access the portal on behalf of our payroll clients.
 
The current guidance received by HMRC is that where you have provided us with authorisation to act for all payroll matters then we should be able to access the portal on your behalf. Based on this guidance we believe we should be able to assist the majority of our payroll clients with submissions should you wish us to do so.
 
As you will be aware the portal is due to open on 20 April to enable businesses to apply for the grant. The guidance on what information needs to be input into the portal is still unclear. HMRC have advised us that national insurance numbers of furloughed employees will need to be input however they were unable to advise whether there will be the ability to import information in bulk. We are aware that HMRC have suggested in a recent webinar that individual employee information is not required which would make the process far simpler. Due to the uncertainty over the level of work involved at this stage we are unable to commit to a fixed cost for us to make the claims on your behalf. We understand further guidance will be issued by Friday of this week to all employers.
 
At this point in time it would be helpful to understand if you would like our help in making the submission and the date that you would ideally like us to submit your claims. Given we cannot provide a fee quote at this point we are not asking you to commit to using our services, rather we are trying to plan our workload to ensure we are in a position to meet demand on particular days. Whilst we appreciate the default may be to say you would like the reclaim to be done on 20 April there are some further factors to consider as follows:
 

• We understand HMRC are going to be releasing a furlough grant calculator on 22 April. Where you are splitting months (eg furloughed staff for part of March) or have a more complex pay structure you may want to wait for this calculator to confirm the claim amount. We suspect that any future HMRC audits will run your claims through this tool;
• You will be able to make a claim across multiple periods ie March and April and therefore you may wish to make the claim once your April payroll is confirmed.

 
Our ability to submit claims on a particular date will be dependent on the traffic that hits the HMRC portal on that particular day and whilst we will do everything we can to submit on your preferred date we cannot guarantee this where there are factors outside of our control. Whilst HMRC have advised the portal has a design capacity of 450,000 users per hour to enable it to deal with an initial influx of claims, anyone who has tried to do their supermarket shopping online recently will be aware of the queuing problems experienced when demand is high.
 
HMRC have advised us that guidance on the use of the new portal is frequently changing therefore we will attempt to keep you informed as matters develop and if circumstances change.
 
If you think you may require our assistance please reply to this e-mail confirming and advising of your preferred submission date.