Universal Credit: PAYE

(asked on 15th May 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many (a) complaints and (b) inquiries that her Department has received from or on behalf of universal credit claimants in employment have been prompted by inaccurate earnings data from the Real Time Information system.


Answered by
Alok Sharma Portrait
Alok Sharma
COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
This question was answered on 21st May 2018

The Real Time Information (RTI) system is working well with over 99% of individual employment records now being reported in real time. This method of sharing information is enabling us to run a welfare system that is responsive to changes in earnings and helps identify cases of fraud. Only a small proportion of the 1% of remaining cases are referred to HMRC to clarify those earnings with the employer.

DWP work closely with HMRC to investigate any risks associated with RTI data, and jointly deal with disputes arising when claimants query their reported earnings. DWP and HMRC continually monitor the data and no significant problems have been identified.

A number of processes are in place to deal with inaccurate data from employers. DWP and HMRC analysts monitor the RTI data received, looking for trends, patterns and causes. Both Departments then work together with employers and partners, such as software developers and payroll bureaux, to improve the quality of the data.

In April 2018 over a million separate RTI notifications were used in Universal Credit Awards. Of those the DWP RTI Dispute Team received under 3000 disputed earnings referrals – a query rate of less than 0.3%. Many of these queries are resolved by an explanation of how Universal Credit works.

Since April 2017 the Department has received 89 complaints alleging that RTI information was inaccurate. In that same period there have been around 11 million separate RTI earnings notifications used in Universal Credit Awards.

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