Payroll Audit

Payroll is the process businesses check least and rely on most: it runs every period, it touches every employee, and because payslips keep appearing, everyone assumes it is right. But payroll errors are silent and cumulative — a misapplied NI category, a benefit processed wrongly, holiday pay calculated on basic hours only, a minimum wage technicality — and each repeats every pay run until someone independent looks. When that someone is HMRC, the arrears arrive with penalties, interest and, for minimum wage failures, public naming.

Acumon's payroll audit is that independent look, on your terms: we test your payroll's calculations, compliance and controls against current legislation, quantify any exposure, and give you the findings while they are still yours to fix quietly.

Calculation Accuracy, Re-Performed

The core of the audit is re-performance: we take a sample of employees across your pay frequencies and worker types and rebuild their pay from first principles — gross pay, tax codes, NI categories and thresholds, pension deductions, statutory payments, attachment orders, student loans. Recalculating independently is the only way to find the systematic error that has been faithfully reproduced every period since someone configured it wrong.

The Compliance Traps: NMW and Holiday Pay

Two areas produce the costliest surprises. National minimum wage failures are overwhelmingly technical — deductions for uniforms, unpaid working time, salary sacrifice tipping pay below the threshold, apprentice and accommodation rules — and HMRC enforces with 200% penalties and public naming, against employers who believed they paid well above the minimum. Holiday pay law has moved repeatedly on overtime, commission and irregular hours; schemes calculating on basic pay alone are accruing back-pay liability every period. We test both properly.

PAYE Settlement, Benefits and Expenses

Beyond the pay run itself, we review how benefits and expenses meet payroll: P11D completeness, payrolled benefits configuration, PAYE Settlement Agreement coverage, termination payment treatment, and the off-payroll working decisions that determine whether contractors belong on the payroll at all. These are the areas HMRC's employer compliance reviews target first — auditing them first is not a coincidence.

Auto-Enrolment and RTI Compliance

We audit workplace pension compliance as the Pensions Regulator would: assessment logic against age and earnings thresholds, contribution calculations against the scheme's definition of pensionable pay — a frequent silent mismatch — opt-out handling, re-enrolment, and declarations. RTI submission history is tested alongside: late or corrected FPS patterns, EPS claims, and the reconciliation between what payroll calculated, what was filed, and what was actually paid to HMRC.

When to Commission a Payroll Audit

The triggers are predictable: before HMRC does — an employer compliance review announcement converts this from prevention to damage control; after inheriting a payroll through acquisition, where historic liability follows the employees; before or after changing payroll provider or software, when configuration errors are born; and periodically as governance, because a function this material deserves independent testing on a cycle. In due diligence, we audit the target's payroll before you buy its mistakes.

What You Get With Acumon

• Sample re-performance of gross-to-net calculations from first principles
• National minimum wage technical compliance tested, including deduction traps
• Holiday pay reviewed against current law on overtime and irregular hours
• Auto-enrolment assessment, pensionable pay definitions and declarations audited
• P11D, payrolled benefits, PSA and termination payment treatment reviewed
• Off-payroll working (IR35) payroll decisions checked
• RTI filing history reconciled to payments actually made to HMRC
• Exposure quantified with a prioritised remediation plan — before HMRC visits

Why Acumon for Payroll Audit?

• All payroll staff hold Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) qualifications
• Runs payrolls in-house for 250+ companies — auditors who process payroll, not just review it
• All payroll team members are based in the UK
• Case study result: reduced HMRC's and the client's initial estimated payroll liabilities by over 80%

Get a Fixed-Fee Quote

Tell us what you need and we'll come back within one business day with a clear scope and a fixed price — no hourly-rate surprises. Call 020 8567 3451 or use the form and we'll be in touch.