Claiming / Unclaiming the NIC Employment Allowance for a previous year

Sometimes you may need to inform HMRC that you wish to claim the NIC ‘Employment Allowance’ for a tax year that has already ended (and in some cases, where you have mistakenly ‘claimed’ the allowance you may wish to inform HMRC that you no longer wish to claim). In order to do this you should resend the final EPS for that tax year with the ‘Employment Allowance Indicator‘ ticked or un-ticked as appropriate. This guide takes you through the correct procedure.

• Open up the relevant file – click ‘File – Open‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager and select the file for the relevant year.
• Click ‘Employer‘ then ‘Employer Details‘ from the main menu, and select the ‘Tax Office‘ tab.
• Tick (or un-tick if not claiming the allowance) the box marked ‘Claim NIC Allowance‘
• Do not close the screen – instead hold down the ‘CRTL – ALT – R‘ keys on your keyboard (at the same time).
• A box will appear referring to the ‘RTI Start date’ –  Ignore the contents of this box and click ‘OK‘.
• Do the same for the next 4 boxes – i.e. ignore the contents of each box and click ‘OK’.
• The next box is marked ‘Force NIC allowance claim/un-claim‘ – click ‘Yes‘.
• Click ‘Tools‘ then ‘Online Filing‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager and select ‘IDs & Passwords‘.
  
• Tick the box marked ‘Temporarily allow submissions to be re-sent‘ and click ‘OK‘.
• Click ‘Pay‘ then ‘Employers RTI schedule‘ from the main menu in Payroll Manager.
• Click on the ‘View‘ button from the bottom row to display the final EPS of the year.
• Check that the ‘Claim NIC Allowance’ indicator is set correctly, then click the ‘click here to re-submit‘ button at the top of the report.

Note: As EPS reports also show items such as ‘SMP recovery’ and ‘CIS deductions suffered’ in the year then you should only follow this procedure if you were using Moneysoft Payroll Manager for the tax year in question. You should not create a brand new file in order to submit and EPS for previous years, unless you know that these other EPS items were zero for the entirety of that tax year.