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I was wondering if you got an answer on this? I'm not sure if it's live or not?
At the moment I've been checking one month at a time All April Starts, All May starts etc. As this column doesn't appear on any of the filters, the downloads or is it sortable.
I've bought it up when I'm dealing with Apprenticeship Service queries, but they just tell me it's been live since April.
As we can't see what PAYE schemes are attached to the AS account and employers don't have they same concerns when it comes to managing their side of the account. I assume that there will be validation for us to resolve at some point. But I can't tell if we're passing 100% compliant or if it just hasn't started working yet?
They just insist that it is working, but it clearly isn't. It shouldn't be blank after April 2026. Maybe we all need to keep reporting it.
I don't think they're going to validate on it or make providers deal with it, but I had a thought yesterday that it might impact on the new £2,000 hiring payment from Oct 2026. There's no info I can find on providers having to code that in the ILR in any way, so I assume it's going to be automatic based on PAYE employment start date, app start date, and DOB. If the PAYE isn't right on the AS account, that might mean the hiring payment doesn't come through. That'll be tricky to even find to check on, especially if the function we're talking about isn't working.
Yes in the presentations on the incentive they've said that HMRC will be handling the checks and "let us know" if there's an issue. So I assume it's this column.
Oddly the AS person I spoke with today wouldn't accept it as a issue and asked me to get in contact with the customer help desk. So I'm going to file it there. I find it really hard to tell at the moment what is AS and what is customer support. Espeically when customer support gives you an answer which is, do this, then get the AS to do this and the AS say "We can't do this" got back to customer support.
Ruth Canham-James
Apprenticeship Service Accounts and PAYE Schemes
Created
Does anyone have any advice on how the Apprenticeship Service accounts really work with PAYE schemes and linked Organisations? We've got some odd scenarios that I just can't work out because I know very little about employment, tax and how companies work. None of this (the link from the about connected organisations) means anything to me. With the new validation on correct Apprenticeship Service PAYE scheme vs student NI, I want to be ready to deal with any issues.
Sometimes we have a group of schools, but they simply have one DAS account, and one PAYE scheme for everyone. The individual schools don't have DAS accounts and aren't listed as Organisations in the DAS account. That's all fine.
We have a scenario where it's essentially one company with one DAS, but two Organisations listed, and I know they have two PAYE schemes but only one is attached. I assume we're going to get errors if they list Organisations A and B, but only the PAYE for A, if they now recruit anyone under Org B? That one seems to be pretty rare. Even if there are two PAYE schemes, I don't think the Organisations and PAYE schemes are directly connected. So as long as the overarching Apprenticeship Service account has A and B Orgs attached, and A and B PAYE schemes attached, that should be fine as long as the apprentice and the right PAYE is attached to the account, regardless of which Org they're listed under?
Apparently one PAYE scheme can't be linked to two Apprenticeship Service accounts, so that may throw up some interesting issues with mergers/takeovers. When we have companies changing name or merging/taking over, my advice is always to treat it as a full change of employer if PAYE is changing. That might not be correct in the case about with the company with Orgs A and B, if the new PAYE is also still under the same Apprenticeship Service account, even if they have switched.
The whole connected organisation thing completely baffles me too. We found out that 6 different employers have accidentally recorded as as a connected employer (presumably when trying to give us permissions as a training provider). From the Employer apprenticeship service account we'd never have known , it's not visible anywhere, and I don't believe we even got a notification, let alone approved it! I only know it has happened because I can see it from our Provider account. One employer recorded their apprentice as belonging to us, and someone here accidentally approved it. Even though it's been stopped back to start, it's still causing issues. I find it bizarre that any organisation can just link themselves to another company with that company knowing.
I suspect a lot of curious things are going to show up with this new validation. Finding these PAYE issues is currently a challenge as you can neither sort by, nor filter for, rows with an issue, and the Employment Status column doesn't appear in the download! We've reported it, but they may fix that quicker if several others report it.