| The Gibraltar Government has announced a number of COVID-19 measures to help businesses through this difficult period.
The majority of measures were announced in the Chief Minister’s speech on March 24th. The full speech can be found at this link We have just released an EasyPay update, V19.27, to help with the new measures. In summary, with regard to EasyPay and running next month’s payroll: 1. For businesses who are unable to work (e.g. Bars & Restaurants), certain Employers can apply for Government financial assistance to pay employees. A new scheme called Business & Employee Assistance Terms (or BEAT) is now available. A detailed document explaining the new scheme, financial assistance, application process, etc. is available at this link. We have contacted the tax office and we are informed that the BEAT payments to employees should be treated separately from payroll. Their earnings from BEAT should not form part of the regular earnings reported to the Tax Office. Therefore as of EasyPay Professional V19.27, employers can go into the Contract for any employee and assign them the status of Inactive COVID-19. The employee will become inactive on payroll and it will not be possible to create any payslips for that employee while they have this status. At one of our customers request, we have also amended the Nett Pay Between Dates Report to show additional information. It shows the number of contracted hours and the number of basic hours. This information will be needed when making an application for BEAT. (Note: With casual workers who don’t have contracted hours, these workers have the hours that they work added to their payslips as Flat rate and other rates. If you use Casual workers, you will need to go into Income Types and tick the box Basic Hours for any transaction types that are used for casual workers, before running this report.) 2. The Chief Minister has said that “Payment of salaries to employees who continue at work in sectors not excluded will not attract PAYE or employer or employee Social Insurance contributions for the month of April. These sums will be retained by the employer and the law will change to exceptionally permit this for this extraordinary period.” This essentially means that all other employers will run their payroll as normal for April. There currently seems to be some confusion as to what will happen with the payment for the Employer Tax and Social insurance for April. A number of employers have asked if this payment is retained indefinitely by the employer or deferred. There is also a question mark on how this affects P7, P7A and P8 forms. We will be in contact at a later date, as soon as we have had official communication on how to proceed. 3. Employers across all sectors (including the Excluded Sectors) will be allowed to defer their PAYE and Social Insurance contributions for the second quarter 2020 by a period of 12 weeks from month end instead of the 10 weeks previously announced. If any employers encounter any new difficulties this month with payroll, then please let us know. Your feedback is very valuable. Where possible we will try to add new features and reports to EasyPay to lessen the amount of manual work. To be kept informed of new information and updates, please sign up to our newsletter at http://eepurl.com/x7mED
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