Using EWSS in Level 3 of the Living with COVID-19 plan, PUP extended until end of 2020 and TWSS Reconciliation

Using EWSS in Level 3 of the Living with COVID-19 plan

The government decided that from midnight on Friday 18th the entire county of Dublin will be placed on Level 3 of the Framework for Restrictive Measures. The measures come into place at midnight tonight (Friday). Dublin will remain at Level 3 for a period of 3 weeks, until Friday 9 October, at which point the situation will be reviewed by the government.

This move means that Bars serving food, Cafés & Restaurants will no longer be allowed to provide indoor dining, and wet pubs will not be allowed to reopen. For many businesses this will mean that they will have to shut down and leads to the question of what to do with employees.

If such an employer is registered for EWSS then they are entitled to pay each employee a wage of €203 per week and claim the EWSS subsidy from Revenue, even if the employees are not working. In such cases the employer would process the €203 as a regular wage payment which would lead to a small amount of PAYE and USC being deducted (depending on the employee's RPN). The employee's PRSI would be zero as it fall into PRSI Class A0, but there would be a charge to Employer's PRSI of 0.5% (€1.02)

This fact is not mentioned in the Revenue EWSS guide, but they have confirmed to us by email that there is no requirement for an employee to be working in order for an employer to claim a subsidy. The full answer given by Revenue in this matter is attached to this article and can be found here>>

This advice was obtained back in August before EWSS was launched, and the query was in relation to Wet Pubs who at that stage were operating TWSS, however the advice is still valid today.

The other alternative is for the employer to temporarily lay their employees off so that they can sign up for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) which has been extended - see below.


Pandemic Unemployment Payment to remain open for new entrants


The Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys, T.D., has secured Government approval to keep the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) open to new applicants until the end of 2020.

Originally as part of the July Jobs Stimulus, a decision was taken to close PUP for new entrants from September 17th.

However, Minister Humphreys secured Cabinet approval to extend this date until the end of 2020.

This means that anyone who loses their employment as a result of the pandemic after September 17th will be able to avail of the appropriate PUP rate.


For more information please refer to the official Government notice

https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/9f11b-pandemic-unemployment-payment-to-remain-open-for-new-entrants/


TWSS Reconciliation

If you were operating TWSS you may have received a letter from Revenue advising you that you will need to begin the process of reporting all the payments made to employees under the scheme to Revenue.

CollSoft Payroll has since the end of April already been reporting all of these payments to Revenue as part of your normal Payroll Submissions, however, any TWSS payments made between the 26th of March and the end of April will not have been reported to Revenue as yet.

We will be releasing an update on Monday 28th that will enable users to easily report these outstanding amounts back to 26th March. This will be done via an easy to use wizard and will only take a couple of minutes to complete.

We would like to point out that the approach taken by CollSoft is different from other Payroll Software providers such as Sage, Thesaurus and Brightpay. Employers using those packages will not have reported any TWSS payments to Revenue, and they will not be able to report to Revenue directly through their payroll software. These employers will be required to create a CSV file in their software and upload it separately to Revenue through ROS. This process has been detailed in the letter sent to employers over the weekend.

Please remember, you will not need to create such a CSV file from CollSoft as we are reporting the amounts directly to Revenue through the software.