Universal Credit

(asked on 13th July 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the reliability of real-time information for the purposes of calculating universal credit entitlement.


Answered by
Damian Hinds Portrait
Damian Hinds
Minister of State (Education)
This question was answered on 18th July 2017

The Real Time Information (RTI) system ensures that we get Universal Credit claims right by providing us with accurate and timely details of earnings and occupational pension payments from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’. The HMRC database holding the PAYE data reported in real time (RTI) receives the data from employers, holds it and passes on relevant data for Universal Credit claimants to DWP.

The system is working well with over 99% of individual employment records now being reported in real time. We don’t collect data on the number of claims affected by errors resulting from the real-time information system. However, 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. As DWP receives copies of the data submitted by employers the risk of data corruption within HMRC is regarded as minimal. However, 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. This work supplements the BACS payment validation process.

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