Before using EWSS, employers must first register for EWSS via the ROS.ie website. Employers have to be tax compliant before they do this.

It is difficult to find where to Register on the ROS.ie website. After logging in to ROS, scroll down until you see the Other Services heading. Click on the option that says Manage Tax Registrations

Near the very bottom of the next screen is an option to Register for the Employment Wage Subsidy Screen.

Click this to continue your registration.

The Covid subsidy screen has changed (C19 button in the employee screen)

When you click this now, there is a third, blue button at the bottom of the screen you should click to set up EWSS

There are two new button in the Covid screen.

 Undo TWSS: For any employee that has a PRSI class of 9  (J9), clicking this button will delete any old TWSS elements just from the employee screen elements tab. Cloudpay will also put them back onto their old, pre-covid PRSI class. Cloudpay will not be able to do this for employees where a pre-covid payment was not processed. We advise checking that the PRSI class is not J9 when processing payments after 31 Aug 2020. These will be rejected by ROS.

All on EWSS: This button will put all employees onto EWSS. (This is done by ticking the new tick box in the PAYE tab)

Not all employees may be eligible for EWSS. (As of Monday 31 Aug 2020, Revenue are still unable to tell us if Directors are eligible.) If you would like to take employees off the scheme, or add new ones onto it you can do this via the PAYE tab of the employee screen.

There is a new check box called EWSS. Tick this and click the Update Employee button if you would like to include an employee in EWSS.

It is Revenue's view that if an employer submits a payroll with EWSS selected for an employee who is paid too little or too much to get the subsidy, then this is an offence. Here is a excerpt of this from a recent email from Revenue:

"It is also our position that inclusion of the EWSS marker on employees in respect of whom a subsidy is not payable constitutes an offence by the employer under subsection (17)."  

(They are referring to the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 (inserted by the Financial Provisions (Covid-19) (No.2) Act 2020))

Due to this, we have had to include a tick box that stops any EWSS submissions where the weeky gross is outside of the €151.50 to €1,462 bandwidth. We have made this a tick box to give the user the option of submitting an EWSS submission outside of the range. This is because there are always going to be exceptions and we would not want to stop any legitimate EWSS claims. The gross pay calculations may also be incorrect. We also note that it is in the legislation that the bandwidth values can change.

This tick box defaults to ticked which means EWSS submissions outside of the range will not have the EWSS marker. You can see this in the XML tab. We recommend making sure that payments are well within the bands. (eg, use €153 instead of exactly €151.50 or €1460 instead of €1462) In case of rounding errors etc.

When an employee has the EWSS tick box ticked in the employee screen, and either:

1. Their weekly gross pay falls in range and the Submission screen EWSS tick box is ticked

or

2. The Submission screen EWSS tick box is unticked.

Then EWSS is included in the submission. You can see this in the XML tab.