Resolving 10 common STP Lodgement Issues

There are 10 common reasons why you may be experiencing issues with lodging an STP event. These issues can be categorised into two areas; 1. Validation Warnings and 2. Lodgement Errors. We’ll take you through the most common Warnings and Errors you may encounter and how to resolve them.
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Validation Warnings in STP Events

Validation Warnings are designed to appear before you lodge an STP event to avoid seeing a Failed return. These warnings will highlight issues with employee data or business settings that need to be rectified before the event can be successfully lodged. While there are a number of warnings that can appear, the transition to STP Phase 2 has introduced a few situations that have become prevalent this EOFY.

The 5 most common validation warnings affecting the 21/22 Financial Year are:

1. Employee Details are invalid/incorrect: This warning can be shown for a number of reasons including invalid TFN, invalid address, invalid email address etc. The warning will refer to which employee is affected and which data is incorrect. A quick update of the employee/s details and you’re good to go!  
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2. Country Code must be provided. When the Pay/Update Date is after 30/6/2020, Country Code must be provided when the Income Stream Type Code is one of the following: FEI, WHM, or IAA: : If the employee is a Working Holiday Maker, Foreign Employee or Inbound assignee to Australia, a valid country must be selected. The country will be the home country as per the employee’s visa/employing entity. For more details on how to set this up, see: STP: Income types & Phase 2 reporting
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3. Year to date Allowances must NOT be negative: This issue can occur when ad hoc pay runs are created to correct previous pay run data. For example, an employee was paid an incorrect Allowance type. As the pay run was finalised, a second pay run was created to replace this with the correct category. Users will need to ensure the year-to-date balance for the pay category is greater than 0.
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4. Duplicate Income Stream Type. Only one of each of the following Income Stream Type Code can be provided: SAW, CHP, WHM, SWP, JPD, VOL, LAB, or OSP: This issue can occur if the employee's income stream type is not updated correctly. If there is only one option selected in the employee's Tax File Declaration settings but the Warning has appeared in an STP event, please contact the support team for further assistance.
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5. Cessation Reason Code must be provided: Selecting a termination reason became mandatory, effective 19 October 2021. This is due to additional reporting requirements in STP Phase 2. If a cessation or termination reason was not provided at the time of termination, it will need to be recorded via the employee's details page, before the STP event can be successfully lodged.

For the full list of Validation Warnings and how to resolve them, refer to our support article here.
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Common STP Lodgement Errors

There are a number of lodgement errors that can occur when submitting events to the ATO. The event will automatically update to Failed and an error message will appear in the Pay/Update Event. Below are the 5 most common lodgement errors and how to fix them.

1. CMN.ATO.PAYMENT.EM92172 We were unable to process your submission because we already have a submission with this submission ID: Possibly one of the most prominent error messages; this will appear if the ATO has successfully received the event but a return message has not been sent back to update the status to Successful. If you can confirm via the ATO portal that the lodgement was successful, let the Support team know and they'll be able to update the status for you.
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2. SBR.GEN.AUTH.006 A notification does not exist for your software provider for sending your online (cloud) transactions: This error means the process of enabling electronic lodgement has not been completed properly. It is essential that the ATO is contacted (either by calling them or using Access Manager) to link the software ID to each ABN. For more information see here.
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3. Error 11: reached retry limit: There is a limit on the number of retries the system will allow before giving up and applying a Failed status to an STP event. When a pay event fails due to the the retry limit being reached, the support team will need to reset the message ID on the event before it can be submitted again.
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4. SBR.GEN.AUTH.008: This error message will appear as Access Manager may not contain the correct Software ID. To resolve this, log on to Access Manager and provide the following details: Software provider name and/or ABN and Software ID. SBR.GEN.AUTH.006 occurs most commonly when the Software ID is missing whereas SBR.GEN.AUTH.008 is more likely to occur when the Software ID is incorrect.
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5. CMN.ATO.AUTH.008: You are not authorised to submit this lodgement on behalf of the client. Not to be confused with SBR.GEN.AUTH.008, this error is most common when you are acting as the intermediary for multiple employing entities. This can be resolved by logging into Access Manager to ensure the business is listed as a 'client' of the intermediary and that you have sufficient permissions to undertake the lodgement of STP.

For more information on resolving common STP lodgement issues see our support article here.

We hope you find this summary useful while preparing for EOFY. Not yet using KeyPay? The new financial year is a great time to re-evaluate your processes and considering changing providers. Get in touch with the team to find out how KeyPay could support your payroll processes throughout FY23.