Maintaining your records before 1 January 2019
Overview
Note
The information in this section refers to your obligations before 01 January 2019. For your current requirements, please see Employer obligations from 01 January 2019.
You need to record your Pay As You Earn (PAYE), Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI), Universal Social Charge (USC) and Local Property Tax (LPT) deductions. You may use any of the following:
- a computerised system
- a record system of your own design
- the services of a payroll company
- an electronic Tax Deduction Card (TDC)
- a USC payroll card
- an LPT payroll card.
You are still responsible for ensuring that the system in use is fully compliant with tax law whether you are using:
- payroll software
- a payroll company
- another agency.
Revenue can inspect your records at any time to make sure you are deducting the correct amounts of tax, USC, PRSI and LPT. See the Code of Practice for Revenue Compliance Interventions for further information.
You must keep all records for six years after the end of the tax year to which they refer. You must also make them available for inspection when required.
Errors discovered during the year
You might find during the course of the year that you made a mistake in an earlier payroll run. You must correct this in the week or month in which the mistake was discovered. The original entries must not be changed. You should make a note against them showing the mistake has been corrected in the later week (or month).
Large under-deductions
You should not collect an under-deduction of tax or USC where it causes hardship to the employee. You should contact us for instructions.
Next: Tax Credit Certificates (P2Cs)