Crackdown on national minimum wage compliance

Enforcement action over national minimum wage compliance led to HMRC identifying £13.66m in arrears owed to over 108 000 workers and issuing 750 penalties totalling £13.72m to non-compliant employers according to statistics from a report by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) which details HMRC’s enforcement activity during 2022-23.

The report also found that HMRC closed almost 3 200 cases with over 900 closed with arrears nearly 12 million workers were reached by targeted communications campaigns and targeted enforcement continued to be the primary method of identifying arrears accounting for 74% of closed cases up from 71% in 2021-22.

The report includes a focus on HMRC’s newest form of enforcement the geographical compliance approach (GCA) which uses a three tiered method designed to encourage employers to comply with the rules and make payments of NMW arrears due to workers. The...