Well, things have changed quickly. This post updates information provided last week, here:
As of Friday 20th March, 9pm Government announced that the initial Refund Scheme of €203 euro was only an interim measure and that an enhanced scheme was to follow.
We have had some guidance from Revenue this evening of the following:
- Employer funded Top-ups to the COVID-19 refund scheme will be permissible,
- The initial refund value of €203 will be increased.
- The refund value will not be back dated to increase any payments made already.
The value of the refund is likely to be pegged at a higher rate, and then adjusted in the next few weeks based on the individual employees circumstances. At the moment Revenue are talking about manually notifying employers what the long term refund for each employee will be.
We don’t know the criteria for this assessment.
It is likely that the scheme will extend for more than 6 weeks.
As the terms of the scheme have changed, the Employer will need to re-confirm their intention to apply the scheme via ROS.
The revised scheme will need to be passed into law, and this will only happen on Thursday with the Dáil sits, with a probable announcement that evening or Friday.
So, if you are going to provide this scheme for your employees then our suggestions are:
- Put the COVID-19 Refund Scheme employees on their own weekly calendar.
- Track payments made at the €203 rate, and any future different rates so that you can reconcile repayments from Revenue.
- Use separate earnings types for COVID-19 Refund payments and Top-ups, again to keep clean records.
- If you can, delay any payment this week until Friday, when the value of the refund is likely to rise.
We have updated our system to automatically create a new calendar, migrate employees, and create a new Refund Scheme earnings rate. Please contact us if you need intent to move people to the scheme.
Again, this may all change very quickly, so please keep reading the following sites for updates:
https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/press-office/press-releases/index.aspx?year=2020
We will be updating our blog posts as things change.
Best wishes to all,