The Chancellor announced last Friday that the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) will be extended for a further month, until the end of June. Our detailed analysis of the Scheme can be found here https://srcadvisory.com/blog/
The move follows government confirmation that lockdown restrictions would continue for “at least” another three weeks. The Office for Budgetary Responsibility has said the Scheme is limiting the impact on employment
Today the HMRC officially opened the CJRS claims portal. The Treasury says the system can process up to 450,000 applications an hour and that employers should receive the money within six working days of making an application.
HMRC Chief Executive Sir Jim Harra is on record as being confident that HMRC could cope with the demand for the scheme:
“We have scaled our IT system to cope with the maximum number of claims that we could receive – there are well over two million Pay-As-You-Earn schemes and our system is big enough to handle a claim from every one of those.”
HMRC has deployed 9,500 staff to deal with queries, including 5,000 on web chat, but there are fears that this website could crash and that phone lines could also be overwhelmed.
This morning, we and other firms experienced a number of technical issues in getting claims filed on the HMRC portal. We remain confident that our hard-working and committed payroll team will manage to file everything as soon as practically possible.
Our payroll team will be sure to contact you should they require further information and once your details have successfully been submitted to the HMRC online furlough portal.
SRC-Time is one of the South East’s leading firms in advising employers of their payroll, pensions and staffing requirements. If you need help with furloughing staff our expert payroll team are here to help and can be contacted them on 01273 326 556 or you can drop us an email at info@src-time.co.uk (payroll@src-time.co.uk) or speak with an account manager to get expert help.
Issue 1-23 March blogs, please see visit out website for all previous and up to date blogs: https://srcadvisory.com/blog
