Tax audit made simple at NHS Trust with NHS Expenses
After a recent visit by HMRC to perform a full tax audit, we chatted with Mark Johnson, Payroll Manager at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to discuss how NHS Expenses gave them full visibility to be able to demonstrate their expenses process.
“We’ve had the Selenity Expenses solution in place for two years, to support business travel, hotel stays and subsistence claims, amongst other expenses. If one of our 700 claimants claims any mileage, the system automatically offsets the normal commute from an individual’s home or ‘base’ – only allowing the user to claim over and above their daily mileage.
There is absolutely no scope for human error as it’s not about how it’s entered into a system or interpreted by a payroll clerk, the system automatically determines whether payments are taxable or not once the appropriate parameters have been set within the system.
We recently had a full HMRC tax audit – our first in nine years – and we were easily able to demonstrate our full expenses process to the inspector. During this audit we had to sit and go through a lot of paper receipts and demonstrate all of our checks and balances to ensure they were accurate. With Selenity Expenses, that’s all done for me – we can go through an output report and show how the data is entered by claimants, and how the system enforces the rules to prevent fraudulent or incorrect claims.
As is the way with human nature, people want to get the job done but, due to busy schedules, can’t always afford the time to spend on certain tasks. With our previous paper-based system, managers in charge of signing off expense claims may sign a form to get it off their to do list – a big to-do list when we’re talking about high-powered, high-stressed healthcare workers. Unfortunately, however innocently, that means some claims slip through their fingers. With NHS Expenses, this is no longer the case.
With Selenity Expenses, a two-minute job to process and check a mileage claim is now no longer than a two-second job, and that really matters in the healthcare industry.
The support we’ve received from Allocate is second to none. They are always on the other end of the phone and have helped us to ensure our claims processing cycle operates as efficiently as we’d expect.”
Mark Johnson, Payroll Manager at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
