Universal credit dispute

madmin

ok so I’ve been told that my payment for this month is 0 Due to my employer saying I got paid £4,904.44 though I’m unemployed and don’t have an employer so I called them and explained this and was told to call hmrc they confirmed that no such payment had been made. My old employer made me redundant on 13/07/2020 my final pay was paid in August, I was paid universal credit for September but looks like I’m getting zero for October due to someone’s error. My question is how can I find out how they’ve got this figure and get through to them that it’s an error 

Alice_Holt

Contact your work coach & the job centre, copy them with your bank statements, etc.   DWP employees have the discretion to override the RTI system, but few do. 

Ask Universal Credit to raise an 'RTI dispute'. 

Request a Mandatory Reconsideration of the decision to pay you £0.


Re the power to override the RTI system:
"Under Regulation 61(3) Universal Credit Regulations 2013 (as amended), the general rule that earnings are to taken from RTI information does not apply:

• In respect of a particular employment where the Secretary of State considers that the information from the employer is unlikely to be sufficiently accurate or timely or
• In respect of any assessment period where:
  • No information is received from HMRC and DWP consider this is likely to be because of a failure to report information (this includes the failure of a computer system operated by HMRC, the employer or any other person); or
  • DWP considers that the information received from HMRC is incorrect, or fails to reflect the definition of employed earnings in the UC regulations, in some material respect

Where any of these exceptions apply, DWP must make a decision as to the amount of the person’s employed earnings for the assessment period in accordance with the UC regulations using such information or evidence as the DWP thinks fit."

huckster

UC uses information which an employers have submitted to HMRC RTI during the assessment period. So at some point in the assessment period, the earnings were recorded against your HMRC record. What sometimes happens, is an employers payroll makes a mistake submitting data and they later remove it. But not in time to avoid the UC payment being affected.

If you send journal messages and call UC on 0800 328 5644, requesting details of the RTI data, plus asking for an RTI dispute to be raised, then hopefully this can be resolved. 
It would help if you could find out from your old employers payroll whether they have issued any data to HMRC during the last month or so. It is not unknown for them to add year to date earnings or redundancy amounts in error onto the RTI returns. And many employers enter the data months after any wage slips were issued.

atlantis187

I thought UC credit worked on net pay so if they use the data HMRC receives from employers then isnt this taxable pay the employer reports and not net?

Spoonie_Turtle

atlantis187 said:

I thought UC credit worked on net pay so if they use the data HMRC receives from employers then isnt this taxable pay the employer reports and not net?

On your payslip you should presumably have gross pay, deductions, and net pay. The information on your payslip is all reported to HMRC, and UC goes by the net figure (after tax and NI contributions, if applicable).

calcotti

atlantis187 said:

I thought UC credit worked on net pay so if they use the data HMRC receives from employers then isnt this taxable pay the employer reports and not net?

It depends. It's gross pay less certain deductions. Allowable deductions are NI, income tax, pension contributions and some charity contributions. In most cases therefore there amount for UC will be the same as the net pay on the payslip.  
However an example of when it will not be the same is where student loan repayments are being deducted. These are not allowable so in the case of someone making student loan repayments the correct figure is the net pay on the payslip plus the amount deducted for the student loan. 

huckster

Third party deductions on wage slips will be ignored by UC with the net ( after tax, NI and Pension) wages before the third party deduction taken into consideration.
Calcotti notes one example above.  There are many other deductions.  For example employment terms that make employees responsible for damage to company vehicles can be a third party deduction. As an example, I have seen a case where a Coach driver damaged a coach they were driving and the employers deducted £1000 towards the damage.  The claimant then questioned why UC were taking into consideration the £1000 wages they had not received.  The reason is that UC would count the £1000 the claimant had paid out of their wages towards a contractual obligation as if they were received.