• Contact creditors if there is a possibility that payments may be missed – Many companies are adapting repayment schedules or making allowances to help people to manage their cash flow, but it is essential to contact them in advance of a missed payment • Be cautious about borrowing – Those who have emergency savings should use them before considering borrowing, and where possible, borrowing should be from friends and family. This is because high-cost credit can create further financial difficulty
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The CIPP’s latest Quick Poll: How has working from home affected your productivity? 11 June 2020
The CIPP’s Policy and Research team has launched its latest Quick Poll on the CIPP’s News Online page.
Following government advice on how to stop the spread of coronavirus, many companies have asked their staff to work from home, where possible, and this has been the case for a number of months now.
The Policy and Research team would like to know how working from home has affected the productivity of payroll professionals, or, indeed if it has had no impact at all. There will be staff who have not been working from home and also employees who worked from home prior to the outbreak of coronavirus, who have not seen any change to the way in which they work. Regardless of your situation, we want to hear from all of you. We appreciate that, particularly under the certain circumstances, payroll departments are under enormous amounts of pressure to get people paid both accurately and on time, so we would be really grateful if you could spare a moment of your time to answer the latest Quick Poll so that we can get an insight into how home working has affected those within the payroll profession.
We will publish the results of the Quick Poll in News Online.
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Updates to guidance on the treatment of expenses provided to employees during COVID-19 15 June 2020
HMRC has updated two pages of guidance in relation to the treatment of certain expenses and benefits provided to employees during coronavirus and on checking which expenses are taxable if employees work from home due to coronavirus. Within guidance, HMRC confirms how to proceed when returning office equipment. If the equipment is provided by the employer, so they have supplied employees with office equipment in order to enable them to work from home, there is no tax charge when they return the equipment back to the employer, as long as there is no transfer of ownership. If an employer does transfer ownership of the equipment to an employee, then this becomes an employee benefit. The charge must be calculated on the market value of the equipment at the time of transfer, minus any amount made good by the employee. If an employee bought their own home office equipment to use when working from home and an employer has reimbursed the exact expense, then unless the employer has specified that the employee must transfer the ownership to them then the equipment is owned by the employee. There is no benefit charge on the reimbursement, and no benefit charge if the employer allows the employee to keep the equipment, as it is something that they already own.
Updated guidance confirms that, if employers pay for travel and subsistence expenses for employees travelling to temporary workplaces, if an employee was furloughed whilst travelling to a temporary workplace then the period of
The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals
Payroll: need to know
cipp.org.uk
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