“If employees have been stood down after the first of March 2020, does an employer have to pay them to receive the $1,500 reimbursement per fortnight?”
The answer is, yes.
In another video, we talked about the requirement to pay the employees first, before you receive the reimbursement. This includes employees who have been stood down because technically they’re still employed by the business.
And so, the answer to the questions is a big, YES.
Your team members who’ve been stood down need to receive, at minimum, $1,500 per fortnight.
If you need help with JobKeeper book a strategy call with one of our accountants.
JobKeeper: Do I need to pay employees first, to be eligible?
The answer is absolutely.
The JobKeeper payment is a reimbursement from the ATO for wages that you’ve paid in the month previous.
The first JobKeeper fortnight commenced on Monday, 30th of March 2020 and ended on Sunday, 12th of April 2020. You need to keep in mind to make the minimum payment of $1,500 per fortnight to each eligible employee to be able to receive the JobKeeper payment from the ATO.
Now, there’s also another rule which says, “As an employer, you can’t just pick and choose which eligible employees receive this benefit.”
Let’s say you’ve got eight eligible employees. You can’t say, “I’m going to pay four employees and the other four I don’t.” Unfortunately, there’s this rule that says, “One in, all in,” which means you need to make sure you pay all eight if you’ve got eight eligible employees.
Having to pay wages throughout the month to then get reimbursed the following month can certainly put a cashflow strain on the business. Unfortunately, there’s just no way around it. The government actually encourages business owners to speak with their banks. We’ve heard JobKeeper payments could be seen as collateral if you are doing some short-term finance such as an overdraft account.
So the answer to the question is, yes. You absolutely have to pay your employees first to then receive the reimbursement. That goes for the payments made in April to be reimbursed in May and every month through to September.
If you need help with JobKeeper book a strategy call with one of our accountants.
If you’re looking to claim JobKeeper from the month of April onwards (Including from the date it was available from – 30th of March) there are five things you need to keep in mind you need to do before the end of May to make sure you’ll be paid when the ATO makes the payments in early May.
- Make sure you check the eligibility for yourself as a business. For most businesses, your turnover will need to have a drop of 30% or more. That’s for businesses whose total turnover is less than one billion dollars a year (that’s going to be most businesses.) So if your turnover is down 30% or more in the month of March 2020 compared to 2019, or the month of April 2020 is a forecasted drop of 30% or more compared to April 2019, we can even do the June quarter 2020 compared to June quarter 2019 as well. So the June quarter forecast versus the June quarter last year. That’s kind of the main test. Yes, there’s a few other tests that you need to satisfy, so make sure you look into that.
- You need to look at your employee eligibility. So there’s a few conditions that employees must meet. JobKeeper’s open to permanent full-time and permanent part-time employees and what they call long-term casual. Casuals who’ve been with the business for more than 12 months. Again, there’s other eligibility criteria. Some of the things are like, they must be 16 years or old. They must be Australian residents or permanent residents, and there’s some visas that are included. There’s a lot of visa types that are excluded, such as student visas or 457 visas unfortunately aren’t included in that. Make sure you do your research on every single one of your employees that are eligible, or even not eligible – you’ve got to work that out.
- Once you know who your eligible employees are, they need to complete the ATO nomination form and send that back to you. Now, you don’t need to send that off to anyone, apart from making sure you’ve got that eligibility nomination form back from your employees. The ATO said you must keep that on file for five years at least. So you’ll need that back from your employees before you go and claim the JobKeeper payment for them.
- Enrol through the business portal. You can apply through the website BP.ATO.gov.au. or you can use the help of a tax agent or accountant to help you through that process as well. You need to let the ATO know a few details through that process.
- Make sure your eligible employees are paid at least that $1,500 per fortnight as a minimum. The JobKeeper payment is $1,500 a fortnight before tax minimum. Now, superannuation depends on if they’re actually working those hours. So make sure you get some help if you’ve got questions around, “do you need to pay super or not on that?” Please make sure you’ve made the payments to your employees to then receive the refund from the ATO (JobKeeper payment) back to your business account. It’s not a payment in advance, this is cash that has to leave your bank account to pay your employees in April, to then be refunded in early May. In terms of the refund window, we’ve been told from early May. It’s a little bit vague, but we expect from about the fourth of May onwards for payments to start happening.
So there’s the five things you need to do to make sure you’re claiming from JobKeeper from the 30th of March onwards.
If you need help with JobKeeper book a strategy call with one of our accountants.
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