Awarding pay increases during Statutory Maternity Leave
At the time of writing, the BBC have recently reported that according to latest office figures, the UK’s population has increased by nearly half a million last year (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33266792). Just over half of the growth was accounted for by natural change i.e. there were 212,100 more births than deaths. That’s a lot of maternity leave!
And that led me to wonder how many SME employees are familiar with the legislation around awarding pay awards during maternity leave and in particular the implications of the now ten year old judgement in Alabaster v The Woolwich plc………Simply put, this case established that a pay rise can not be withheld when an employee is on maternity leave.
Legal firms preyed on by “Vishing” con
I attended Crowe Clark Whitehall’s (www.crowehorwath.net) Cheltenham COFA breakfast yesterday hosted by Mark Hunt, Head of Professional Practices – Cheltenham with guest speaker Julie McArdle from the RBS Customer Security Team. There were several COFA’s from local law firms in attendance and I think all of us left the breakfast meeting with one shared thought:
“We must share this with our accounts team now – this is really serious!”
Submitting Your Tax Return On-line
Completing your Self-Assessment Tax Return online requires the same information and financial information as if you were submitting via paper.
The key advantages to submitting on-line (as opposed to via paper) is that you have an additional 3 months to make the submission (31st January as opposed to 31st October), you only need to complete the sections that are relevant for you and submitting online means that the calculations are done for you, automatically.
The online submission will lead you through the process beginning with a welcome which gives a helpful reminder of the paperwork that you may need before your start. You then complete a section about you (name, address, Ni number etc) followed by a section called “Tailor your return” which is a simple series of questions with a yes or no answer which will ensure that you then only complete the sections of the full tax return which are relevant to you.
Bank Scam Warning – Simple Steps to Protect your Money
Unfortunately hardly a week seems to pass by without some news report of people having fallen victim to bank scammers. It seems hardly credible that despite the publicity around these scams over recent years and the simple steps needed to safeguard the funds in your bank account that these scams are still prevalent and finding some success for the criminals operating them. Yet it seems no-one is immune to this type of fraud and theft as the Solicitors Regulatory Authority has recently issued a warning to the law firms it regulates to be wary of scammers tricking firms into disclosing bank security information over the telephone.
The warning cites four firms that have been targeted this way recently, and which have collectively had £2 million taken from their accounts. The scammers gain the confidence of those they call – known as social engineering – to obtain important information and access account funds. Specifically, they ask for “challenge and response” codes, which are used to authenticate payments and in some cases digital banking log on and password credentials. The SRA Executive Director of Operations, said: “These scammers are very active and convincing. They are highly sophisticated in their approach and therefore very capable of duping many people.”
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