Occasionally HMRC will reject FPS submissions for many reasons such as 

- Using the wrong sender ID and Password.

- The submission is for an inactive PAYE scheme.

- Employee specific errors such as negative year to date figures or invalid characters in an employee's name.

Where the error message relates to an employee(s) submission data, click to view the details of the error message. You will see an error code and information related to why the submission was rejected by HMRC.

The message from HMRC will state 'The submission of this document has failed due to departmental specific business logic in the Body tag'.

This can be for a number of reasons, so check the 2 next lines on the error message from HMRC for more details. The first of these other lines shows the value (this could be numerical or text) that it is not in an acceptable format for HMRC to receive. The last line will give you an indication of where the problem is (ie which element is causing the issue)

In the image below, we can see that there is an employee whose Employee Pension year to date figure is -68.46. HMRC are rejecting this negative year to date figure

In order to ascertain which employee this relates to, we can often do this quite simply by searching the FPS content. Close the Error details pop up and look at the content of the submission on the right of the screen. Click into the the tab that says 'Submission XML'.

Click CTRL + F (or command + F on a mac) to search for the value in the error message. Your browser screen will skip to the section of the FPS with this value. In the screenshot below, you can see that Simon Bridge's "EmpeePenContribnsNotPaidYTD" figure is -68.46. This correlates with the error message

This method will allow you to find out which employee is triggering the error message and make the necessary adjustments on your payroll.

Further information regarding RTI submission error messages can be found here

If you have moved over to BrightPay mid-year, check the mid-year totals are correct and that the figures entered are not causing the negative YTD values that HMRC are rejecting.