Pensions: what to do about over- and under-payments

by | Feb 25, 2019 | Pensions

PCSE and NHSE have published guidance on their website recently covering pensions administration. It’s a helpful document which you can point PCSE to if they tell you something which disagrees with what’s in there, and it covers several areas previously discussed in posts here.

This post, however, aims to set out what to do if you have either overpaidor underpaid your pension. I won’t go into the possible reasons for this, although generally it will be because the tier of employee contributions you paid was set incorrectly for some reason.

The important bits in the PCSE guidance linked above are in this section:

Important information regarding pension adjustment payments

Once PCSE has processed your end of year certificates we will automatically adjust the next contractual payment run to account for the arrears or overpayments. You do not need to take any action.
If you wish to make a payment before the end of the 18/19 tax year you must submit your end of year certificates first. You can then make an ad-hoc payment via online banking. PCSE’s customer support centre can provide NHS England’s bank details over the phone. They can be contacted on 0333 014 2884.
When making a payment it is important to enter the reference in the following format:
Practice code – year ending for example: P82004YEND2018
If the correct payment reference is not used, the payment cannot be quickly allocated to the correct fund. This delay may result in the amount being deducted again from the practice’s next contractual payment.

Step-by-step guide

Currently, this guide only applies to doctors who do some or all of their work through an employer or GP surgery. This is because it’s not yet clear how things are intended to work for locum GPs: I have asked for clarity!

  1. Complete your end-of-year certificates first: the forms can be downloaded from NHS Pensions.
  2. If your end-of-year forms suggest you are owed a repayment, then you need to check where that will go, i.e. your performer’s list status.
    • Go to the Performer’s List website and search for yourself – e.g. I would search for “GP Nicholas Grundy”, which gives the screenshot below
    • If your practice is correct, i.e. it’s your current main employer, then your repayment should go directly there per the advice from PCSE, and you should discuss this being paid out to you with your practice.
  3. If you have to make a repayment, you can either make that yourself directly, or allow PCSE to take it from your practice.
The “Practice” field is the relevant one.

How to change your practice on the performer’s list

  • If your practice is not correct, you need to apply to have this changed.
  • Worth noting that this is likely also to mean that your current pension contributions have not been taken from your existing practice yet, and are instead still being taken from a previous practice, so it is probably worth checking this with your practice managers if you can!
  • The form you need will vary slightly based on whether you are moving within an NHS England Area Team (NPL3) or to a new NHSE Area Team (NPL2) – but they can be downloaded from the PCSE website. Or, confusingly, also from the NHS England website, which I am certain results in lots being sent to the wrong organisation in error – I will suggest this is changed, as having them in two places on the websites of two different organisations is confusing.
  • Predictably, the forms don’t work terribly well – for instance, per below, the boxes for your GMC number don’t accept text input – so delete bits where you need to to get the information in.
  • Once you’ve completed the form, you need to send it to your NHS England Local Area Team. To find out who they are, you need to search by postcode back on the Performer’s List website here.
  • In keeping with much of the rest of the process around GP administration managed by Capita, I think it’s fair to call this a dog’s dinner of a process, but this should ensure you then get repaid to the correct practice, and hopefully also that your ongoing pension contributions are correctly taken and processed.

What about interest?

If you, or if a practice, is owed money by PCSE, the view of GP Survival is that interest should be paid where the money has been outstanding for more than a month, it should be repaid with interest. There is precedent for this, both in NHS Pensions paying interest on errors (see Regulation T8) delaying members’ pensions or under-valuing them, and in the procedure around Small Claims Court interest.

Equally, if a satisfactory way of resolving PCSE’s historical errors can be found which acknowledges the time and effort required from members and practices to supply lost information, it may be reasonable to waive this. This will take further discussion.

What to do if you have underpaid and owe money

  1. The other possibility is that you have underpaid, and need to pay PCSE additional money.
  2. PCSE’s own guidance gives two options:
    1. You can make the payment yourself, using your unique reference number. This should then mean no additional money is taken from your practice.
    2. You can do nothing, and allow PCSE to take the money owed from your practice in the next payment run.
    • Needless to say, neither of these is ideal. Both put the requirement for either an individual member or a practice to come up with a large sum of money in a short timeframe, through no fault of their own given the mess of pensions administration and the current decade-long amnesty. I will ask NHSE to ensure that sums over (say) £1000 for an individual, or over £3000 for a practice, can be staggered so as not to financially destabilise general practice.
  3. If you go for option (1), be absolutely sure that you use the right code! If you subsequently find that a payment has *also* been taken from your practice, please raise a case through Capita’s online portal, and notify NHS England by e-mail if the sums involved are significant to you.

What about locums?

Good question. If you are a locum, you don’t have a regular employer for PCSE / Pensions to take arrears from, nor for them to repay historical overpayments to. As of today, 25th February, three days before the deadline for submitting end-of-year forms, there is no form to claim repayments on the NHS Pensions website, which talks about them being there “in the near future”.

As above, I have tweeted asking them for clarification that locums will not be disadvantaged financially versus those with an employer, and will follow-up with NHSE / PCSE.