Articles

Flexible benefits, tax credits, salary sacrifice - gaining an understanding of the basic concepts can help your decision making enormously. This library contains a number of articles and fact sheets to get you started.

  • Rebating Employer's NI Savings
    Opinion leading organisations are already, prior to auto-enrolment, actively encouraging their employees to invest in pension provision. One way they are doing this is by rebating some, or all, of any NI savings made by sacrificing salary into a pension.
  • A Typical Implementation Project
    This article is designed to give you a feel for what is involved in a typical implementation with us. Obviously each project is different but usually the same sorts of issues occur and there are always one or two last minute changes that need to be accommodated.
  • Benefit plan designs
    This fact sheet defines some terminology that we have developed within Mazars Employee Benefits to help our customers understand and articulate their requirements of a modernised employee benefit scheme.
  • Benefit plan designs - flex
    Flexible Benefits or "flex" is a generic term for an employee reward system that allows, at least in part, some employee choice over the elements of their pay and benefits package. The term is used loosely and can mean completely different types of scheme to different companies and individuals.
  • Creative HR & benefits - more than pensions
    One part of the employee experience of working for a company is the benefit package and “total reward” is one of the newer concepts in defining the scope of what it is to work here.
  • An integrated approach to benefits managements
    Traditionally, benefits have been managed on a disjointed basis with each benefit provider operating their own administration process with the employer (with varying levels of input from the intermediary).  The intermediary role is typically focussed on product recommendations, employee support and troubleshooting.
  • Accounting for Benefits
    Accounting for employee benefits can be quite difficult. This is an overview of how we overcome such issues and account for benefits within Redbourne. We are not saying that our way of doing it is necessarily the best way but hopefully it will get you thinking and help you if you are about to change your benefits scheme or administration processes.
  • Environmentally sensitive employee benefits
    Climate change is big news for all of us and building a green employee benefits package is easier than you might think. Here Richard Stewart looks at some key areas:
  • Employee discounts - what's the big "deal"
    Voluntary employee benefits have, until recently, been the term used for deals and discounts across various products and services to their employees. The employer either arranges these individually or through a specialist provider that offers pre-selected ranges of products and services. Typically, these will include discounts with holiday companies, entertainment and retail discounts. Whilst the employer communicates these to their employees, normally the employee deals direct and uses a code to obtain the discount.
  • Employment law and flex
    This fact sheet is designed to highlight some of the areas that relate to the implementation and operation of a flexible benefit plan for an employment law perspective. We must point out that each organisation's legal situation will be different and good advice is always sensible when making changes to terms and conditions of employees. However, we hope this provides a useful overview of some of the key areas.
  • Identifying and managing risks
    Introducing a new benefits structure into an organisation presents a number of risks and this fact sheet identifies these and suggests some ways of managing these. Salary sacrifice One popular way of delivering a modern employee benefit package is to use salary sacrifice as a mechanism to optimise the tax treatment of an employee benefit package for both employees and the employer. However, there are risks associated with this as the Inland Revenue can deem these an ineffective if they are not administered correctly.
  • Employee communication
    This fact sheet relates to the introduction of modern employee benefit arrangements and provides some general guidance based on our experience of implementing this type of plan over the last 5 years. Sometimes, changes to employee benefit packages will require more technical and specific communication, especially if benefits are being reduced or removed. However, even this can be well communicated and help employees understand and appreciate the reasons behind the changes.
  • Healthcare and flexible benefits - a review of the issues and solutions
    How do you incorporate private medical insurance within a flex plan? Many say you can't but that isn't strictly true. Here we look at the common issues and provide a range of solutions.
  • Paperless Employee Benefits Administration
    Employee benefit administration has been a serious issue for human resources departments for years. The good news is that the enrolment for and administration of many benefits are now available on a paperless basis, cutting delays, errors and freeing up valuable resources.
  • Tax treatment of employee benefits
    Modern employee benefit plans provide a number of potential tax advantages to employees and employers.
  • Salary Sacrifice - getting the basics right
    Even the name conjures up fear and confusion with employers and employees and yet the basic concept of exchanging pay for employer provided benefits and less tax seems remarkably sensible.
  • Implementing a modern employee benefits scheme
    Employers offering modern, sophisticated benefit plans are increasingly seen as progressive, employee focussed and gain significant competitive advantage but setting up and then managing this type of plan can be complex, expensive and result in increased administration.