Hi everyone,
Just an update regarding the JobKeeper Payment subsidy. The ATO have a final session planned Wed 15th April, with the software vendor / Digital Service Provider (DSP) community. We are aiming to have guidance documentation ready for partners / clients within the next 24 / 48 hours, showing what is required to register employees to JobKeeper program using our products and then transacting any top-up payments
What to do right now?
The main guidance for employers right now is to register their interest in participating in the JobKeeper payment from 30 March 2020 at ato.gov.au/jobkeeper. Employers must understand and meet the various criteria to be eligble for the subsidy. Check out the various factsheets here at https://treasury.gov.au/coronavirus/jobkeeper
What will be next?
A process has been presented by the ATO and is being discussed with Digital Service Providers (DSPs) in terms of roll-out. One thing to be aware is that employers will have the opportunity to register eligible employees right up to 26th April for any JobKeeper payments from the 30th March, so there is no need for concern.
How we see the process working at this moment in time
Employers are being urged to use the STP pay event to notify the ATO of eligible employees. Employers will be asked to generate a "ad-hoc" pay and use a new pay item, JOBKEEPER-START-FNxx, (where “xx” refers to the fortnightly period from which the payment first started) which will be used to register eligible employees to the JobKeeper, as well as to notify the ATO the fortnight in which the JobKeeper payments started to each employee. A new Allowance Pay item is to be used as the basis to "signify" registration to the ATO. The ATO have produced a numbering sequence of the fortnights, so this will be included within our documentation.
Once registered, employees are then paid there normal salary / wages. For those employees who are paid $1,500 or more per fortnight (or equivalent), there is no further action required by the employer, as the ATO will now understand what periods the employee is being paid and as such, will provide the correct reimbursement up to the $1,500 per fortnight amount.
For eligible employees who are paid less than $1,500 per fortnight, they must be paid a “top-up” amount to bring their taxable gross to $1,500 per fortnight for paydays within the JobKeeper fortnightly periods. These “top-up” amounts must use a new Allowance payitem, JOBKEEPERTOPUP.
PLEASE NOTE: Deviations from the exact descriptions on these new Allowance code, including failure to use 2-char to indicate the period number, may significantly delay or prevent reimbursement. These have not been confirmed, and as of the end of last week were still talking points within the ATO & DSP community.
We will confirm the process in the next 24 / 48 hours
As you can see, the process will need the correct guidance and still some confirmation from the ATO before we go to market. As I have seen already today, the MYOB AccountRight team released a wiki article to their client-base, and unfortunately, they did not use the current naming conventions for the new Allowance pay items, and as such, if any clients had implemented using these items, they will have difficulty in receiving the correct subsidy reimbursement amounts.
So after the planned session with the ATO tomorrow, we will be in a great position to launch our guidance documentation to partners in the coming 24 / 48 hours.