You must complete your re-declaration within five months of the third anniversary of your duties start date or staging date.
The process can only start when you receive a declaration of compliance letter from the pension regulator, you’ll need your letter code and PAYE reference. Although you have five months to complete your declaration, we recommend that you start gathering all the required information as soon as possible after. To help you do this, you should use the declaration checklist which shows you all of the information you will need and where you can get it from.
There are some numbers you will need to get from your pension provider.
Pension Scheme Tax Reference number (PSTR) – This is the number that HMRC allocated to each of Aegon’s scheme when they were registered with HMRC. This number shows that the scheme is a registered UK pension scheme.
Employer Pension Scheme Reference number (EPSR) – Employers need this to ‘declare their compliance’ with their automatic enrolment duties to the Pensions Regulator. This number is allocated by your pension provider and is simply the scheme number. So if employer ABC is using a GPP, scheme number 12345, then the EPSR is 12345
Pension Scheme Registry number (PSR) – This is an 8-digit number that starts with a ‘1’ which is assigned by the pensions regulator (tPR) to all registered schemes to allow them to uniquely identify schemes. Employers using an occupational pension scheme for auto-enrolment need this number as well as the EPSR in order to declare their compliance to tPR. The scheme trustees can provide this to the employer. Once you have completed your declaration of compliance you still have ongoing duties towards your staff.
Regular review of your workplace pension helps with completing your declaration of compliance. Do you need help speak to one of our financial planners?