Having trouble with National Insurance numbers (NINOs)?

This seems to be one of those matters that was not thought through at the time! In the summer HMRC started issuing NINOs with a KC prefix. The problem was that these were not on the lists of approved prefixes given to software providers! So HMRC’s systems did not recognise them, nor did payroll software.

The Real Time Information (RTI) system will be updated from 15 November to accept these codes but HMRC’s basic tools will not be updated before April 2017 and some software providers might not update their software before then.

To get around the problem, the NINO field should be left blank but the employee’s address field must be completed.