Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department takes to validate the PAYE data it receives from HMRC on the amounts paid to claimants of universal credit.

Before Pay As You Earn (PAYE) data is used by Universal Credit, an individual’s details are validated against both the DWP Customer Information System and HMRC’s Citizen’s Identification Framework to ensure they match between both government departments. This ensures the correct HMRC PAYE data is being used by Universal Credit for each individual. If the details do not match, the cases are investigated manually.

Once an individual’s details have been successfully matched the HMRC Real Time Information System sends PAYE data to the DWP Real Time Earnings System. As the PAYE data is received, the DWP Real Time Earnings System performs a series of validation checks to ensure the correct PAYE data is used in Universal Credit payment calculations. This process validates for missing or incorrect data, including duplicate data, and also validates for Employer corrections and errors.