Martin-Redman Partners writes:
One of the things that anyone in financial services learns quickly is that the rules change and it can be hard to keep up. The recent anticipated changes in pension payment are a case in point; if you had told me in January 2014 that by April 2015, a new pensioner might be able to take their whole fund as cash, less the applicable income tax, I would have suggested that you were crazy - as 100+ years of history suggested that releasing the underlying fund was impossible!
Auto-enrolment has its own odd changes, this one down to case law. Limited Liability Partnerships, (LLPs), a common corporate structure for solicitors and accountants, have previously assumed that “Equity Partners”, being self-employed for tax purposes, are not employees or “workers” and therefore are outside of the requirement for Auto-enrolment. A decided case in the Supreme Court on the 22nd May 2014 has overturned that assumption, (Clyde & Co LLP vs Bates van Winklehof), with an equity partner to be treated as a “worker” for the purposes of the Employment Rights Act 1996, and therefore by extension, as a worker for the assessment for Auto-enrolment.
To add to the fun, The Pension Regulator is seeking to apply this retrospectively, so any LLP with a staging date up to and including 1st May 2014 must re-assess the workforce, to ensure that no one has been missed. For LLPs with a staging date after 1st May 2014, prudence would suggest assessing very carefully!
One upside of an expectation of regular change in the rules is that regulators provide bulletins of changes on a regular basis. The change outlined above is at http://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/docs/automatic-enrolment-use-of-powers-june-2014.pdf
Unfortunately, you have to read all of them when they come out and put in the time to work out what the practical impact is.
I think you may need an adviser!
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