What the employer reports, by when, and why the immediate report is not enough

A snack bar in Leipzig hires a temporary worker for a street festival on a Saturday and plans to register her on Monday, together with the payroll. In catering that is one day too late: the start must be reported no later than the first hour of work, and the statute provides for a fine of up to 25,000 € for the missing report.

Who reports, to whom, and on what occasion

German social insurance does not learn about an employment from the contract of employment, nor from wage tax. It learns about it from reports that the employer files electronically. Without a report, the employee does not exist, at first, for health, long-term care, pension and unemployment insurance.

The core provision is section 28a of Social Code Book IV. It obliges the employer to file a report with the collecting agency for every person insured by law in these four branches, whenever one of the events occurs that paragraph 1 sets out in a long numbered list.

So the addressee is not one central authority but the health fund of each individual employee. A business with ten staff spread over six funds reports to six collecting agencies. Payroll software distributes the records, but the routing starts with the correct fund in the master data.

• start and end of employment subject to insurance
• start and end of parental leave, and an interruption of pay
• changes in contribution liability and a change of collecting agency
• one-off pay, where it has to be reported separately
• start and end of vocational training or partial retirement work
• a change in pay that crosses the marginal-employment threshold in either direction
• an insolvency event and the dissolution of the employment relationship

The list shows that reporting is not a one-off formality at the start. It accompanies the employment. Every change that matters for contributions or later benefits produces its own record, which extends the employee's insurance history.

Each report and each record in it must carry a unique identifier. That sounds technical but has a practical consequence: a wrong report is not overwritten, it is expressly cancelled and replaced by a new one.

As to content, paragraph 3 requires for each insured person in particular the insurance number where known, name, date of birth, nationality, the activity code from the Federal Employment Agency's classification, the establishment number, the contribution groups and the competent collecting agency.

If the insurance number is missing, the employer does not simply wait. Under paragraph 3a it requests the number from the pension insurance data centre; the other reporting duties continue unaffected. A missing number is therefore no reason to postpone the registration.

For mini-jobs in private households, paragraph 7 provides a special form, the household cheque. It replaces the report under paragraph 1, must be filed without delay and comes with a direct-debit mandate. It plays no role for businesses; it only explains why some rules of the section do not apply to private households.

Two further details are required on registration, and they have consequences. The employer must state whether the employee is its spouse, civil partner or descendant, and whether the person is a managing shareholder of a GmbH. These answers trigger a status review, which a neighbouring course covers.

Registration and deregistration: first payroll, six weeks at most

The deadlines are not in the statute itself but in the data collection and transmission ordinance, the DEÜV. Its section 6 governs registration: the start of employment subject to insurance must be reported with the first following payroll run, and no later than six weeks after the start.

The wording contains two limits, and the earlier one applies. An employer who runs payroll at month end and hires on the 12th must report with that month's payroll, not after six weeks. The six weeks are the outer limit for businesses with longer payroll cycles.

Section 8 DEÜV mirrors this for deregistration. The end of employment subject to insurance must be reported with the next following payroll run, and no later than six weeks after the end. What counts is the legal end of the employment, not the last day actually worked.

For short engagements, paragraph 2 allows a simplification. If no registration has been filed by the time of deregistration, both may be filed together within the section 6 deadline. That covers, for example, a temporary worker who leaves after three weeks, before the first payroll ran.

Paragraph 3 turns the same technique into a duty. If pay rises above or falls below the marginal-employment threshold, a deregistration and a registration must be filed together within the section 6 deadline. The employee effectively moves from a mini-job into regular insurance, or the other way round.

Section 12(1) DEÜV requires the same pair of deregistration and registration when the reported contribution group, the person group code or the employee's health fund changes. An employee who switches funds is deregistered with the old collecting agency and registered with the new one, even though the employment itself is unchanged.

For apprentices kept on by the same business, section 12(2) DEÜV requires the end of training and the start of employment to be reported. The first day of the month may be reported as the start of training, and the last day of the month in which it ends as its end.

A further duty concerns long-term care insurance. Under paragraph 13 of section 28a, the start of employment subject to that insurance requires an additional report to the pension insurance data centre, within seven days. When the employment ends, the matching report is filed at the same time as the deregistration.

The immediate report in eleven sectors

In certain sectors, registration with the first payroll is not enough. Section 28a(4) of Social Code Book IV obliges employers there to report the day on which an employment starts to the pension insurance data centre no later than when the work is taken up. Section 7 DEÜV repeats this deadline word for word.

Two differences from ordinary registration stand out. The addressee is not the health fund but the pension insurance data centre. And the deadline does not run in weeks; it ends when work begins, so the report must already be filed on the first working day.

In practice this means two records to two recipients for the same person. The immediate report goes to the pension insurance before the first shift, even on a Saturday. The registration follows with the payroll, to the health fund. Triggering both routes separately in the payroll software keeps either from being forgotten.

The immediate report is lean. It contains surname and first names, the insurance number or, failing that, date and place of birth with the address, the employer's establishment number and the day work begins. The statute asks for nothing more at this point.

The key sentence comes at the end of the paragraph: the immediate report does not count as a report under paragraph 1 sentence 1 number 1. It therefore does not replace registration. An employer who reported immediately must still register with the collecting agency in the ordinary way with the first payroll.

The immediate report is stored in the pension insurance master file. Its purpose is control: anyone found on a building site or in a kitchen should be identifiable as reported from the first day. A report caught up on the following day no longer serves that purpose.

By its wording, the duty attaches to the sector in which the employer employs people, not to the individual activity. A hotel therefore also reports its bookkeeper immediately, and a construction firm its office clerk. Anyone unsure whether the business falls within one of the sectors settles that before the first hire.

Interruption, parental leave and one-off pay

Not every break in pay ends the employment. Under section 7(3) of Social Code Book IV, paid employment is deemed to continue while the employment relationship continues without entitlement to pay, but for no longer than one month. A short unpaid leave therefore does not trigger a deregistration.

This one-month fiction expressly does not apply when certain benefits are drawn, such as sickness benefit, injury benefit, transitional allowance, maternity benefit or parental allowance, or when parental leave is taken. For these cases the DEÜV provides a report of its own, the interruption report.

Section 9 DEÜV requires it when employment is interrupted by loss of pay entitlement for at least one calendar month and such a benefit is drawn. The period up to the loss of pay entitlement must be reported, within two weeks after the end of the first calendar month.

At two weeks, this deadline is far shorter than the six weeks for registration. The payroll office must therefore know when continued pay ends and sickness benefit begins. Without that information from HR, the deadline is practically impossible to meet.

If the employment ends during the interruption, a deregistration under section 8 is due. If it ends in the calendar month after the pay entitlement lapsed, paragraph 2 applies a six-week deadline from the end of employment to the interruption report, and the end is deregistered as well.

Parental leave has its own rule. Section 12(6) DEÜV requires its start and end to be reported separately to the health fund, where the employment is interrupted by loss of pay entitlement. This report is due with the next payroll run, and no later than six weeks.

One-off payments such as a Christmas bonus are normally reported together with regular pay. Under section 11 DEÜV they are reported separately only in certain situations, for instance when no further report will be made for the calendar year concerned, or when regular and one-off pay fall under different contribution groups.

A long unpaid leave without any of those benefits is different. The fiction in section 7(3) carries it for one month only. After that, employment subject to insurance ends in the statutory sense and section 8 DEÜV requires a deregistration; if the employee returns, a new registration follows.

Annual report, notice to the employee and cancellation

Once a year the reporting draws up a balance. Under section 28a(2) of Social Code Book IV, everyone employed on 31 December of the previous year must be reported. Section 10 DEÜV sets the deadline: with the first following payroll run, and no later than 15 February of the following year.

No annual report is due if a deregistration, an interruption report or another report under section 12 has to be filed as at 31 December anyway. Pay is included only to the extent it has not already been reported; missing annual reports may be requested electronically by the collecting agencies.

It must not be confused with the special annual report for accident insurance under paragraph 2a, due by 16 February of the following year. That one carries the company number, the hazard tariff position and the pay liable to accident contributions; the details are in the course on accident insurance.

For marginal employees, paragraph 9 applies the general rules accordingly, with two exceptions. No annual report is filed for short-term employees, and reports on the start and end of parental leave are not filed for mini-jobs at all. Which collecting agency is competent there is covered in the course on mini-jobs.

Employees are entitled to know what has been reported about them. Under paragraph 5, the employer tells them the content of the reports in text form at least once a year by 30 April, with the current payroll run or at the latest the next one.

A stricter rule applies when the employment is dissolved: the statement must be issued without delay after the last report has been filed. The notice may be given separately or attached to the monthly pay statement, which most payroll programs do automatically.

Errors are not corrected silently. Section 14 DEÜV requires a report to be cancelled without delay if it should not have been filed, went to the wrong collecting agency, or contains incorrect data on the period of employment, pay, reason for filing, contribution groups or establishment number. The correct report is then filed anew.

That completes the framework of reporting. Reports tell social insurance who is insured and on what pay. How the money itself flows, when it falls due, who checks it and what a failure costs is the subject of the second module.