Coronavirus: Furlough Leave – HMRC portal now open

Around four weeks after first being announced by the government, HMRC went live with its furlough portal at 7am on Monday 20 April.

You can access the portal here.

There were some inevitable teething problems and the website, as expected, struggled to deal with the rush to log in on Monday morning. Some of these have now been addressed or ironed out (including an online calculator which showed the wrong figures being taken down), but not all of them.

One important issue is the inability to have different employees being furloughed for different dates – it appears only one set of dates  is capable of insertion. This means for example, that you could not have some employees furloughing from 1 – 30 April, and others from 1 April – 31 May.

Payment of the furlough grant will be made within six working days of an eligible claim being accepted and naturally employers with cash flow problems will want to complete their application as soon as possible.

Having said that, if you expect to have employees on furlough leave over different dates, it might be sensible to keep your powder dry for a few days until those issues are ironed out.

The details required to complete the application are:

1. The Government Gateway log-in details from when the employer first registered for PAYE;

2. The employer bank details, PAYE number and company registration number (or taxpayer reference number);

3. The name, contact details and national insurance number of each employee;

4. The start and end date of the claim (or claims, if amended);

5. The full amount being claimed for all employees (including NI and pension contributions); and

6. If claiming for 100 employees or more, the above details will need to be uploaded to the portal via a spreadsheet.

If you have encountered any problems or issues, please do let us know and we can feed this back in a further update.

If you have any queries about your specific circumstances, our specialist Employment team are here to help.