Errors in existing pension records
What should happen:
- You / your employer submit pensions payments and forms to PCSE/Capita
- PCSE update their local systems
- PCSE pass your data to NHS Pensions
- NHS Pensions updated your Total Rewards Statement (TRS)
As of the time of writing, most people cannot access accurate TRS statements. The main reasons for this are (1) forms either not submitted, or lost by PCSE/Capita or their predecessors and (2) PCSE failing to process submitted forms, or rejecting them for various reasons (e.g. the Performer’s List)
Progress is being made. In late 2018, there were c.3,500 errors in the pensions online system, of which c.600 sat with PCSE – all of which would prevent you being able to access TRS data.
This number is now down below 10,and NHSE tell me that they should be fixed in the next scheduled update.
Missing data in pension records
- Many of you have missing years in your pension record, and again these generally mean you can access no subsequent data (so if you’re missing 2012, even if every subsequent year is in the system, you will see nothing after 2012).
- Currently, PwC think there are c.700 people missing years prior to 2013, and c.2000 in 2014. I suggested this may be an under-estimate. They have begun looking at this by going through the hard drives from the old pensions handling centres, pre-Capita, and the boxes of stored paper documents since Capita took over.
- It is positive that progress is being made reducing these numbers, and that NHSE / PwC have heatmaps to show where info is missing.
- However, there needs to be an agreement on what happens when data is simply missing. It cannot be acceptable, as currently, that doctors are asked to go back 7 or more years and resubmit every form they sent in at the time. Further, if evidence of pension contributions is missing, it is not reasonable to expect people to keep every payslip ever issued. This needs further discussion once the scale of the problem is better understood, but GP Survival’s position continues to be that gaps in data from more than a small number of years ago must either be filled by PCSE, or doctors’ and employing organisations’ accounting and administrative costs in providing them are met in full.
- If you have incurred costs providing data to PCSE, for instance in accounting fees or in sourcing data from several years ago, you can raise a formal complaint with them and request compensation for this.