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Allstar has admitted that a glitch in its fuel card service has left thousands of customers without their purchase transaction data.
The firm began migrating customers from its outgoing system, operated by former owner Arval, onto a new platform run by current owner FleetCor in late December. But the process has caused an absence of data since the beginning of the year, leaving businesses exposed to National Insurance liabilities.
Brian Flood, VP for network and service at Allstar, confessed that the transition had led to big problems: "We have been migrating customers onto the FleetCor platform. and this has proven to be a very complicated process."
The absence of data has also caused huge backlogs at the company's call centres, with a massive increase in calls from affected fleets. Allstar's customer service staff have been unable to manage the increase in phone traffic.
Flood continued: "The traffic to our call centre has increased significantly. resolving these inevitable teething problems is our top priority and we have added additional resource within our customer call centre to cope with the additional traffic. Normal service to customers will resume as soon as possible."
The issues also coincide with the introduction of a series of fees for Allstar card users, which have the potential to significantly increase operating costs for business customers.
Paul Jackson, MD of rival fuel and mileage cost specialist TMC, explained to BusinessCar what the consequences of a loss of fuel data would be and what action fleets can take: "If you can't get this information on private fuel then you've got a class 1A National Insurance liability. There's millions of pounds of liability if [fleets] don't get that data."
Despite those concerns, Jackson said fleet operators are unlikely to be penalised by HMRC, but there would be large admin consequences in calculating business and private fuel spend.
He advised: "There won't be fines - this is a mitigating circumstance because [fleets] haven't got the data.
"Drivers need to take their overall mileage and work out their pence per mile from the total amount. The corporate needs to work out what the average previous pence per mile was. HMRC will be happy with that, either using HMRC fuel rates or using the average pence per mile from previous months." Jack Carfrae
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