New evidence indicates more widows and widowers may also have underpayment errors on their State Pension claim.
The Department for Work and Pensions recently published updates on the progress of the State Pension Underpayments Legal Entitlements and Administrative Practice exercise and the Home Responsibilities Protection corrections exercise.
Sir Steve said: “Having had to spend years checking hundreds of thousands of historic State Pension calculations for errors, you would hope that DWP would be making sure that new claims are handled correctly. But we have found worrying evidence that this is not the case. The exact amount of inherited State Pension depends on individual circumstances, but could be higher if the late spouse was an employee, rather than self-employed and the widowed spouse is not receiving a widow’s pension from a company pension scheme .
Current estimates of the total arrears due through the LEAP exercise is £970 million to 133,000 pensioners and recognised a provision of £369 million, reflecting the outstanding amounts it still expects to repay. Latest State Pension News State Pension Underpayments - LEAP exercise The State Pension LEAP is the DWP’s largest underpayment correction exercise in progress. It has been established to identify where State Pension underpayments may have occurred in respect of the following groups of people:
HRP was a scheme designed to help protect parents’ and carers’ entitlement to the State Pension and was replaced by NI credits from April 6, 2010. HMRC is using NI records to identify as many people as possible who might have been entitled to HRP between 1978 and 2010 and have no HRP on their NI record.
National Insurance records are maintained by HMRC based on information from employers through PAYE, Self-Assessment tax returns from the self-employed and information provided by DWP on benefit receipt where that creates a National Insurance credit.
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