Anomalies in the national minimum wage legislation

Over recent years compliance with the national minimum wage (NMW) and the national living wage rules has been an increasing area of focus. Enforcement teams have targeted large employers and identified a number of instances of failure to pay. In many of these cases the failures were technical in nature such as salary sacrifices in which employees have chosen to reduce their pay in return for a non-cash benefit being treated as a deduction for NMW purposes. Notwithstanding this employers have been ‘named and shamed’ for underpayments of £100 or more.

Investigations which are run by HMRC are often accompanied by a checklist of common risk areas. However there are a number of interesting less-common anomalies in the legislation which have cropped up recently and I have highlighted three of them below.

As a reminder a person has...