Audience: HR Pay & Pensions Managers with responsibility for delivering Civil Service pensions to staff
Action: To note new reporting arrangements for 2006-2007
Timing: Immediate
To assure the Cabinet Office that you are carrying out your employer responsibilities in line with the delegated conditions laid down in our guidance, we ask you to complete a set of Quarterly Stewardship Reports (QSRs). At the end of each financial year you also have to complete an Annual Report, and your Permanent Secretary or Chief Executive, whichever is applicable, has to sign an Accounting Officer’s Certificate (AOC). (For Scottish employers, this is called the Accountable Officer’s Certificate.)
You will know that we have recently changed the wording of the AOC to give greater emphasis to your most important tasks. This, in turn, has provided us with more meaningful information.
In order to reduce the reporting burden on you without diminishing our ability to monitor your performance, we have recommended to the Cabinet Office Audit and Risk Committee (COARC) that we no longer ask employers to complete QSRs. Instead of monitoring the pay over of partnership contribution and Civil Service Additional Voluntary Contributions (CSAVCs) using the QSRs, we will be liaising directly with the designated 3rd party pension providers who will tell us which employers are failing to send them contributions within the scheme standard of 3 days.
The change will allow us to concentrate on the small number of employers who do pay late rather than on the majority who pay on time.
You will be pleased to know that COARC has accepted our recommendation.
We are also amending the information we ask for in the Annual Report and intend to move the period the report covers from April-March to January-December. We will tell you more about this later in the year.
This document is subsequent to EPN137
Contacts:
Enquiries about content, distribution or to receive in a different format
employerhelpdesk@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk
01256 846414
Employer Helpdesk
Civil Service Pensions
Grosvenor House
Basing View
Basingstoke
RG21 4HG