Support for Recruitment Agencies

Reducing your time-to-placement with flexible systems and proactive customer support

Ensuring Compliance for Recruitment Agencies

Compliance is at the forefront of everything we do at Nasa. With the myriad of legislation in place, or soon to be in place, we work tirelessly to ensure our systems and processes comply in full - well before looming implementation dates. The following section outlines the key areas of compliance that affect Nasa, our contractors and our agency partners.

Onshore

Nasa is fully onshore, operating out of our central Bristol office. At no stage are any funds processed offshore or is any 3rd party business involved. Our directors and shareholders are all UK residents, and contractor employee income is taxed in the UK under the PAYE regime.

We are strongly supportive of the clamp down on offshore operators to ensure a level playing field for all reputable umbrella companies in the UK.

Offshore

From April 2014, workers who traditionally have operated self-employed (for example under CIS) will no longer be able to do so when working through an agency. As such, Nasa will operate all workers under either a PAYE Umbrella Company or a LTD Company service. From April 2015 where any reporting requirements begin for our agency partners, we will provide all necessary information promptly. As no workers will be self-employed, there will be no liability for unpaid PAYE or NIC for any of our agency partners.

Conduct of Agency Regulations

We support our agency partners in compliance for the Conduct Regulations. Our Umbrella Contractors retain the choice of whether to Opt In or Out, but we have noticed that the majority will tend to Opt Out of the regulations - allowing us to process any Opt Out notices supplied.

The choice of whether to Opt In or Opt out for LTD Company contractors is very much their choice, however many decide to Opt Out in order to maintain an element of risk for their IR35 status.

National Minimum Wage

Nasa Umbrella is fully compliant with National Minimum Wage, and we ensure our systems are kept up to date each time there is a government change to the National Minimum Wage rate.

Due to the way that the contract income is calculated through an Umbrella Company, we ensure that all Employment costs and our Umbrella margin are taken into account to make sure a worker is not paid below NMW. Due to this, we are only able to process contract rates at a minimum of around £13.50 per hour to verify compliance with NMW.

In the event we receive contract information with contract rates below NMW we will get in touch to let you know. We'll also update you should a future increase to NMW impact any workers currently employed via Nasa Umbrella.

AWR

The Agency Worker Regulations are an EU directive designed to ensure parity of certain elements (including basic pay) between agency workers and directly employed workers.

This regulation requires Agencies and Umbrella Companies to work together, to ensure each agency worker receives equal treatment after being on site for 12 + weeks.

Nasa assist our agency partners with AWR compliance by operating a standard ‘Matching Permanent Pay’ model. Via this method, we will ask you to send us ‘Comparator Data’ (the salary and annual leave etc), and we’ll calculate if the pay rate is compliant with AWR. If there are any issues raised at this point, we will advise you so that the required next steps can take place.

Any contractors working through their own LTD Company are not within scope of AWR, so these steps are not required.

IR35

The 'off payroll' working or IR35 legislation was introduced by HMRC, and targets those who are working under disguised employment - ie working and being paid via their own LTD company whilst their working circumstances imply an employment relationship. Those who are inside IR35 must be employed and paid on a payroll with all appropriate tax and NI deducted at source.

All workers who join Nasa Umbrella become our employee, and are therefore paid under Umbrella PAYE, with all relevant deductions made at source and reported to HMRC. This means that the IR35 status is not relevant in this circumstance, and that our employees and agency partners don't need to worry about the IR35 legislation whilst working via Nasa Umbrella.

Those contractors working via their own LTD companies will be on contracts determined outside of IR35. Nasa Consulting are pleased to have some of the industry's leading experts among our accountants, who are uniquely placed to offer the best advice and support to our clients.

MSC Legislation

Managed Service Company legislation came into force in 2007, and with it came debt transfer provisions - putting agencies at risk. Although a very remote risk, we take any potential risk very seriously.

Nasa Umbrella operates a strict PAYE Umbrella Company, completely removing any risk to our agency partners for MSC or debt transfer.

Our LTD Company accountancy (provided via Nasa Consulting) have been rigorously designed and tested to ensure that Nasa is not an Managed Service Provider nor are the contractors MSCs themselves. Please contact us if you wish to discuss this in more detail.

Pension Auto-Enrolment

Auto Enrolment is a government pension scheme designed to help everyone to save for their retirement. All UK employers must have a scheme in place – Umbrella Companies included.

Nasa has operated with an auto-enrolment scheme since our staging date in September 2013. We’ve paired up with NOW Pensions to provide auto-enrolment for all of our employees – covering both eligible and non-eligible workers. We implement a 12 week postponement period for all employees, which means that deductions to the pension scheme will not take place for new eligible workers until they have been employed by Nasa for 12 weeks.

Compliance

Support for Recruitment Agencies

Reducing your time-to-placement with flexible systems and proactive customer support

Ensuring Compliance for Recruitment Agencies

Nasa Group