1. Administering Civil Service Pension Scheme for the United Kingdom
  2. Late Joiners, Opt Outs, Backdated Transfers and Rehires

Late Joiners, Opt Outs, Backdated Transfers and Rehires

Late joiners, opt outs, backdated transfers and rehires need to be included in the MyCSP interface files in the following ways.

Late Notification of a Joiner

If you receive late notification of a new member who started in a previous payroll period, you must enroll them manually as of their hire date. The Qualifying Scheme Joining Date on their Pensions Automatic Enrolment card must be their hire date and you must create a Benefits and Pensions card manually as of that date.

If you don’t enrol them manually and they are processed by Pensions Automatic Enrolment in a later payroll period, their start date will be the first day of that payroll period. In this case, you must delete the automatically created Benefits and Pensions card and create a new card manually as of the person’s hire date.

Opt Outs

If an employee opts out of a pension scheme and has no Benefits and Pensions card, the association detail on the Pensions Automatic Enrolment card is required for the employee to be included in the MyCSP interface files.

If an employee has a Benefits and Pensions card, but they opt out of a Civil Service pension scheme prior to completion of the first payroll run, the qualifying pension scheme component on the Benefits and Pensions card is deleted (together with their Pension Payroll ID). When this occurs, the employee’s Pension Payroll ID is automatically transferred to the Historic Pension Payroll ID field on their Pensions Automatic Enrolment card > Enrolment Details.

If they opt back into a qualifying scheme later, their existing (historic) Pension Payroll ID is moved from the Pension Automatic Enrolment card back onto their Benefits and Pensions card, where it can be reselected or overridden on the new qualifying pension scheme component.
Note: For Partnership scheme opt outs, you must report the main qualifying pension scheme the person was eligible for (and may or may not have enrolled in) prior to joining Partnership.
You record this in the Scheme Eligible to Join field on the Pensions Automatic Enrolment card under Pensions Automatic Enrolment Details. (If you try and perform a Partnership optout without that information, an error message will be raised.) The “scheme eligible to join” and its associated scheme logic will be used for all Service History records for the person as long as they are opted out (for example, if they go on a 50% paid sickness absence or unpaid absence).

See the Service History section on Opt Outs for information on recording an opt out.

Backdated Transfers

You can perform a backdated transfer for a member within 3 months of joining the original scheme. The Pensions Automatic Enrolment process will automatically end date the existing pension component and create a new one.

A mid-period backdated transfer may result in the contributions being calculated for both the original scheme and the new scheme. This is because the pension element is still active at the end of the period, due to the proration group rule for leavers. (The proration group is needed for terminated employees whose final close - that is, their calculation card end date - is mid-month. Without the proration group, the pension element entry would not be picked up in payroll processing that month.)

As noted in the Backdated Transfer from Qualifying Scheme to Another Scheme in Administering Payroll for the United Kingdom in the Oracle Help Center, you must manually handle any refunds from deductions in the original scheme. You will need to make balance adjustments to transfer the contributions from the original scheme to the new scheme.

Rehires

In the case of a rehire where the same Alt Key applies and is expected by MyCSP, you must reuse the Pension Payroll ID from the previous employment:

  1. Check the Pension Payroll ID from the previous employment by referring to the previous employment's Benefits and Pensions card. The card is active until the final close date so you must use an effective date that is earlier than that.
  2. Create the new Pensions Automatic Enrolment card and component for the new employment, recording the previously used Pension Payroll ID in the Historic Pension Payroll ID field.
  3. When the PAE process runs, the Historic Pension Payroll ID is moved to the new Benefits and Pensions card.

If you do not record the Historic Pension Payroll ID, you can still override the automatically generated ID on the Benefits and Pensions card.