Real time information

Businesses of all sizes need to know about Real Time Information (RTI), a project launched by the Government to overhaul the way PAYE works in the UK that started in April and which will be fully rolled out by October.

Pay As You Earn has been with us since 1944 having been originally set up to aid collection of taxes during the Second World War but changes in work patterns, payment patterns and the sheer volume of information handled by the system have left it straining to cope. The system was designed to run on paper. Reconciling all the information by hand used to take months - many weeks even on computers - as there were over a dozen different systems around the country that couldn’t automatically cross check each other.

What’s worse, as computers took over the processing of the information, tiny errors and inconsistencies that a human would have simply ignored or amended became a major stumbling block. Some taxpayers had multiple records.