On the go: The accountant of a London cafe has been ordered to pay £6,857.50 after he admitted falsely claiming to the Pensions Regulator that staff had been enrolled into pensions.
It is the first time that the regulator has prosecuted a third party, working on behalf of an employer, for this offence.
Gran Caffe Londra in Knightsbridge, run by Primadell Ltd, missed its deadline to auto-enrol staff into a workplace pension in October 2015.
The regulator launched an investigation and arranged an inspection, but cancelled it when Hashmukh Shah, 63, declared that the company had met its duties. However, the regulator later discovered that the declaration was false; no staff had been enrolled into a pension scheme and no contributions had been paid.
When interviewed by the watchdog, Shah admitted purposely misleading the regulator and preventing an inspection of the business that would have uncovered the employer’s failure to auto-enrol its staff.
On August 15, Shah pleaded guilty at Brighton Magistrates’ Court to knowingly or recklessly providing false or misleading information to the regulator, an offence under section 80 of the Pensions Act 2004.
Shah was fined £3,937.50 and ordered to pay £2,800 in costs and a £120 victim surcharge.
District Judge Teresa Szagun said: “In firefighting the financial crisis of the company, Mr Shah in fact chose to ignore the individuals who actually, as the casual workforce, were probably the least well off.
“The false information he provided was deliberate and with the knowledge of the risks that involved, including the potential harm it could cause.”
She added that Shah was “remorseful and mortified about the error” he had made.
The regulator's director of automatic enrolment, Darren Ryder, said: “This case sends a clear warning to accountants and advisers tasked with completing an employers’ automatic enrolment duties – providing [the regulator] with false or misleading information may land you with a criminal conviction and a fine.
“We take very seriously our role to ensure workers get the pensions they deserve and are entitled to by law. We do not look kindly on people whose deception gets in the way of our work.”
Gran Caffe Londra eventually became compliant in March 2018 and the company has backdated pension contributions for its staff.
The regulator's latest compliance and enforcement bulletin shows that a record number of employers – over 27,000 – received compliance notices for failure to meet their legal duties in the quarter to June 2018.
The regulator also issued an unprecedented 12,000 fixed penalty notices.
