Cintra iQ has an interface that will identify employees who had a TPA band change due to backdated spine point increases and require adjustment to their pension and the MCR file.
Follow instruction on this article to learn how to import spine point values: How do I import spine point values in bulk? – Cintra iQ (zendesk.com)
Identifying the Affected Employees
Once you have imported the new pay spine values and have calculated the payroll you are required
to run an interface to find the affected employees who require the manual fix.
- Go to: Tools > Interfaces
- In the search box on Interface Definitions window search “Annual”, this should then bring up the “Teachers_Pension_Annual_Pay_Increases” interface. If you can not see this a system admin is required to unrestrict the interface.
- Press Open on the interface and then Produce Outbound File,
- In a drop-down box for Pension Scheme select Teachers Pension.
- In the 2nd drop-down box for Contribution select the main Teachers Pension Contribution
- select the relevant payroll in the 3rd drop-down box.
- In the next drop down box choose the current pay period and press run. The report should now come to screen, save this in the relevant folder.
This report highlights all employees who have had their Teachers Pension contributions rebanded in
the current process and for which periods. The Relevant Pensionable Pay is the pay in which the
employee paid pension on in the affected period, the Percentage column is the percentage the
employee originally contributed and the Date From is the start date of the affected period.
There will only be data in the post columns if the employees pension contributions are assigned to a
post.
How to change employees affected by the band change.
Suppress backdated pension contributions
To begin correcting the TPA pension contributions you will need to check the pension deductions in
the current months’ payslip for the employees on the interface report. You will need to make a note
of the pensionable pay and pension contributions for when they were processed in the affected
period, this should match the interface report. In the below example this would be 9.6% and
£3927.75 for January and 9.6% and £4580.50 for February.
Add a notional pensionable pay for each affected period with the period amount of what they paid pension on during that pay period. This is to suppress any backdated pension corrections. You will need to tick Applies to Employee as Cintra IQ will default to having this unticked.
End the current pension contributions at the end of the last unaffected period. In this example that would be 31/12/2023 as both January and February were affected for this employee. After this create a new pension contribution for the affected periods using employment specific contribution rather than inherit standard contribution. Use the pension contribution that the employee had before the backdated pay award was processed. In this example both affected periods were pensioned at the same percentage (9.6%) so this can be done as 1 contribution, if the pension bands were different for the affected periods before the backdated pay award you will need to do 1 contribution line per period.
Correct the current months' contributions.
To ensure the backpay is pensioned correctly you need to total all the pensionable elements the employee is receiving in the current period. In this example salary – Teaching and Revision Hours Pens are both pensionable headings. This means the employee should pay pension on £5156.82
(50.82+5106). You will need to add this value as notional pensionable pay for the current month.
After adding the notional pensionable pay, restart the TPA Care contributions from the beginning of the current period as inherit standard contributions.
After checking the employee’s payslip and confirming their TPA contributions do not have any corrections visible and all the pensionable pay is being pensioned at the current months band, move to the next employee on the comparison tab and repeat the procedure.
Further attention steps
- If, in the current month, after adding the notional pay, the customer adds other pensionable pay
for the employee, the notional pay will need to be changed to include the added pay. - The interface report only brings through anyone who has a month recalculated at a new band but not if their previous month differs from current month and did not change band. E.G. If an employee earned base salary in September with a pension band of 7.6%, in October they received
£1500 banded pay which put their band up to 8.6% and then in November they received the
backdated salary increases which does not re-band a whole month’s contributions. This process
would not flag that October’s backpay is being pensioned at the incorrect band as the whole
month of October was not re-banded. You should include this in your internal checks once the pay award process is complete. - This manual process requires amending to the lines on MCR file to BK lines. A quick guide on how to complete these amendments can be found on the teachers’ pension website: backdated-pay-awards-quick-guide.ashx (teacherspensions.co.uk)
Was this article helpful?
That’s Great!
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry! We couldn't be helpful
Thank you for your feedback
Feedback sent
We appreciate your effort and will try to fix the article