Employment related securities year-end reporting: registration process and deadlines

The registration process

In order to complete and submit a return a ‘scheme’ needs to be registered online.

To register your schemes and arrangements, you need access to HMRC Online Services and PAYE for employers. Once you have access:

1. Login to HMRC Online Services
2. Continue past the security message
3. Click on ‘services you can use’ in the left-hand menu
4. Click on ‘PAYE for employers’
5. At the bottom of the page on the right-hand side there is a section called ‘employment related securities’. Click on ‘register a scheme or arrangement’ and follow the on-screen instructions

Deadlines and penalties

All reportable employment related securities (ERS) events must be notified to HMRC on the annual return by 6 July 2024. To enable a return to be filed for any given year, the appropriate type of employee share scheme therefore needs to be registered before the 6 July 2024 using the process above. As the whole registration process can take up to six weeks, we would recommend that the scheme is registered well in advance of this.

Although PKF Francis Clark can assist in the preparation and submission of ‘other’ ERS returns (Form 42) or any approved scheme returns, it is the company’s responsibility to register the scheme(s) first. It is not possible for us, as agent, to submit a return for 2023/24 unless the company has first registered the scheme.

As the penalties are geared to the failure to submit returns, we generally recommend registering the fewest number of schemes possible (as one return per scheme is due annually). For example, it is possible to register a single ‘other’ scheme to report all ‘non-tax advantaged’ ERS events for a whole group.

We have produced a number of blogs in the ’employment related securities’ (ERS) series to help you:

• ERS year-end reporting: summary
• ERS year-end reporting: what is ERS year end reporting?
• ERS year-end reporting: what has to be reported?