31st August 2020
A change in requirements
There has been a slight change made to the ‘eligible employee’ requirement for JobKeeper 1.0 which means more employees will now be eligible for the $1,500 fortnightly payment from the fortnight beginning 3 August 2020.
Previously only those employed at 1 March 2020 could be considered an eligible employee, however now employees on your books on 1 July 2020 may be eligible for payments.
These newly eligible employees will be able to receive payments for the JobKeeper fortnights starting 3 August 2020 and ending 27 September 2020. By my calculation, that means these newly eligible employees would receive $6,000 (being 4 fortnights at $1,500 per fortnight).
General JobKeeper principles to keep in mind:
- The ‘one in all in’ rule applies to any new staff that are eligible, so you need to offer to all additional eligible staff.
- The minimum payment per JobKeeper fortnight is $1,500, so you must ‘top up’ any staff that were paid less than this in each fortnight you intend to claim for them.<
So, if your business meets the 30% decline in turnover test which we’ve discussed before and you’ve hired new staff between 2 March 2020 and 1 July 2020 you should:
- Check employee eligibility here
- Ask employees to agree to be nominated through your business by completing this form
- Make payments of at least $1,500 for each eligible employee for each fortnight backdated to 3 August
- Include new staff in your next monthly ATO reporting
Apologies for the late notice, but this was a very recent announcement. Please note that this is just for newly hired staff, for all existing staff there is no change and no need to do anything different. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me or the team.
Cassell & Co Team
