Farmers are being urged to prepare themselves for pensions auto-enrolment or face potential fines.
Auto-enrolment requires employers to automatically enrol staff into a qualifying workplace pension scheme in the coming years.
Each business will have a staging date for auto-enrolment depending on their size and number of employees, while many will have already completed the process.
Paul Laird, director at The Fish Partnership, said farmers need prepare for their staging date months in advance.
He said: “Auto-enrolment responsibilities will begin from June 2015 for farmers and businesses with 49 or fewer workers.
“But even though the date when your business is affected may still seem a long way off, we would advise farmers and rural businesses to start planning for auto-enrolment at an early stage.
“By taking action now, when the time does come to start automatically enrolling your eligible workers into a qualifying workplace pension, you will be ready to hit the ground running.
“If farmer fail to prepare for auto-enrolment they could face significant penalties from The Pensions Regulator. If a “statutory notice” is issued for non-compliance and then ignored, firms with between five and 49 employees will be fined £500 a day, while a daily fine of £50 will be issued to firms with one to four employees.
“Farmers cannot afford to ignore the warnings, and our advice is to find out as early as possible what their requirements are, making sure any existing payroll arrangements are suitable for automatic enrolment.”
