Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what percentage of earnings data provided to her Department from HMRC Real Time Information PAYE data and used in live claims to calculate Universal Credit awards contains a BACS hash.

The Department does not hold the information requested. The BACS hash is not passed to the Department from HMRC. The Department assist HMRC with Real Time Information disputes, and a manual intervention can be made to correct the Universal Credit award when validated against a claimant’s pay slips.