REWARD
60 not out!
Don Macarthur MA PhD FCIPP, CIPP PAS Assessor, shares his experiences of conducting Payroll Assurance Scheme (PAS) assessments over the past 13 years
O n the topic of reflection , it occurred to me earlier this year to consider how many PAS assessments I’d done. And although I don’t keep old assessment reports or emails for data protection reasons, I realised my old invoices could give me the answer I wanted. As a result, I found that I’d done 60 assessments. I think I’m safe claiming this as a record, because I did the very first assessment in 2012 and have been doing a few each year since. If anyone thinks they’ve done more, they’ll no doubt tell me when they read this article! So, how did this start? I had a long and very varied career in the Inland Revenue and then HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) – let’s call it HMRC for convenience. My final role there involved trying to create initiatives to improve relationships between HMRC and the nation’s two million employers. From the feedback I received from other employers, as well as my own, I can be very proud of my achievements in that role, although I shall leave that for a possible future article. At the time, my job title was Employer Programme Director, although I think in today’s parlance we could say I was the first Head of Employer Engagement. Either way, this proved to be easily the most satisfying part of my career. As I started to create that role, I felt it was essential to develop very close links with the pay community, among other representatives of employers, such as the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors.This was the start of my association with what’s now the CIPP, and my friendship with many of its officers and members. So, when I came to retire
“We launched the Payroll Assurance Scheme at the Annual Conference and Exhibition in October 2012”
from HMRC, the CIPP Head of Strategy and Policy at the time, Karen Thomson, came knocking at my door asking if I’d consider working with her team to create something that we might loosely refer to as a payroll assurance scheme. At that time, the CIPP was going for Chartered status, and Karen felt that an initiative of this kind would help to show it was an organisation equipped to provide a useful suite of services to all UK employers, whether members or not. Readers may share my amusement that in these days when so many pubs and shops feel they must keep changing their names to stay current, Karen’s original ‘payroll assurance scheme’ wording was adopted as the title, and has remained the same for all these years, in which PAS has grown from strength to strength. The initial planning took about nine months, and we launched PAS at the Annual Conference and Exhibition in October 2012, when the keynote speaker was the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, David Gauke. He was very happy to give PAS a plug as something the Government was keen to support. I carried out the first PAS assessment in early December. I followed that with a second just before Christmas, which I shared with a new Assessor to enable him to then start assessing on his own. This new Assessor was the first of 16 I’ve inducted into the role over the years. I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as
I saw how well these early visits went down with CIPP managers and, more importantly, with payroll teams. But I was always clear that PAS had to expand and adapt in light of experience – both mine and that of people with much more payroll knowledge than me. Lessons learned The first item to develop was the basic assessment structure, which divided the subject matter into obvious payroll process areas like software, new starters, security and payments, with more topics and detail added as time went on. From the outset, I wanted to include some people processes alongside the payroll processes. After all, there’s little point having the best payroll processes in place if you don’t have well trained and managed staff to operate them. But the CIPP had a separate payroll quality partnership scheme which covered that area and had been up and running since 2007, and we needed to avoid duplication. As time went on, it became increasingly obvious that having two separate products didn’t make sense, and after three years we merged them into a single process which has stood the test of time well. One other early lesson was about the distinction between employers and service providers, because PAS had to attract both if it was to provide a reasonably comprehensive service. We also needed to get the primary
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | December 2025 - January 2026 | Issue 116 16
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