Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the answer of 21 February 2022 to Question 120805, on Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, for each phase of the Scheme, how many and what proportion of payments made by HMRC were made against claims for employees for whom no National Insurance number had been recorded on HMRC's Real Time Information system.

This question was answered on 25th February 2022
As set out in the answer given to PQ UIN 120805, to qualify for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) employers needed a Pay As You Earn scheme and to submit a Real Time Information (RTI) return. Additionally, for claims with 100 employees or more, employers were required to provide details of the individual employees’ wages.

It is not mandatory to have a National Insurance (NI) number to be employed, therefore not all employees on furlough would have a NI number attached to a claim made by their employer for CJRS.

Undertaking further in-depth analysis using RTI would take significant time to execute, and undertaking the analysis requested could only be done at disproportionate cost. As a result, the Government is unable to say what proportion of payments under CJRS were in relation to employees without a NI number.

HMRC designed the schemes to prevent fraud before any payments were made, through the eligibility criteria set and in the design of the claim process itself. Data and risking experts blocked suspicious claims that showed signs of criminal activity and built upfront controls into the claims process to reduce the risks of fraud and error and to ensure that employers provided the data needed to do later checks if necessary.

HMRC limited the eligibility of grants to employees who already had a tax footprint. They also put in place a series of checks on claims before they were paid so that those that were highly indicative of criminal activity were blocked.