24 April 2020
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published a statement introducing some temporary measures for firms submitting regulatory returns to ease the operational burden during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, including a one month extension to the submission deadline for ‘High Earners Reports’.
Background
Under the EU’s Capital Requirements Directive IV, the FCA is required to collect information about high earners. The FCA collects this information by requiring in-scope firms to submit a High Earners Report annually within 4 months of the firm’s accounting reference date. The report must set out, on an aggregated anonymised basis, information on the remuneration of all employees with total remuneration of EUR1 million or more. More information regarding the High Earners Report can be found here.
Key points
- The deadline for submitting any High Earners Report that is due up to and including 30 June 2020 has been extended for one month.
- This means, for example, if a return is due on 22 May 2020, the submission will need to be completed by 22 June 2020. If the extended deadline date falls on a weekend, the submission should be made by the next working business day.
- The FCA still expects returns to be submitted as soon as possible and any firm that misses a deadline (in the period up to 30 June) will be sent a reminder letter by the FCA.
Tapestry comment
The one month extension will be welcomed by in-scope firms and forms part of much wider temporary measures that extend the submission deadlines for a whole range of regulatory returns, as set out in the statement we have linked above. These extensions represent the latest step by the UK financial services regulators to reduce some of the operational burden that firms are experiencing. The FCA has indicated that they will continue to monitor the situation and will keep these temporary measures under review. We will continue to issue alerts as further changes impacting your remuneration arrangements and compliance are published.
If you have any questions about this update, or in relation to your remuneration regulation compliance generally, please do contact us.
Matthew Hunter
