The accurate and timely updating of NHS Pension records reduces data cleanse effort and ensures up to date information is reflected in Total Reward Statements, Annual Benefit Statements and Annual Allowance Statements. Taking action now to clear data errors and submit missing updates will improve the processing of your 31 March 2020 year-end data.
For employers submitting their year-end through ESR
Where there is an error on a member record, new information submitted will not process. Errors will accumulate until the original error is cleared. The following actions can prevent the most common data errors:
- Clearing SD55 Annual Update errors will prevent error 0421 – member record not updated for previous year.
- Clearing SS10 Joiner errors will prevent error 0186 or 8030 – no employment or record found to match.
- Clearing SD55 Termination errors will prevent a record showing as non-updated after the legislative deadline date for updating records has passed on 1 June 2020.
Clearing errors before year end processing will improve the success rate on your Heat Map.
For employers submitting their year-end via Pensions Online (POL)
Where there is an error on a member record, you cannot access the record to submit the year end 31 March 2020 annual update:
- Check Employer Allocated Errors and clear any joiner, leaver & terminations errors before 31 March 2020.
For both ESR and POL Employers
Checking POL notifications; Re-employed Pensioner Rejections will ensure that you are not deducting contributions where an employee is not eligible to contribute to the Scheme or submitting unnecessary year-end data.
When you have cleared your errors – check your ADP4 or Non Updated Years. Submit any missing joiners, annual updates or terminations, as necessary.
NHS Pensions Allocated Errors
NHS Pensions continue to clear errors allocated to us.
If you have information that will assist us in clearing errors allocated to NHS Pensions in POL Error Handling, you can send this to us through the ‘Add Comment’ facility then submit. This must only be done if you are providing information to enable us to clear the error.
As these are already allocated to us, we will work on them in business priority order, based on the impact of the error on your members. Therefore, we ask that you do not submit comments asking us to clear the error or advising that you are not able to, as these are of no assistance to us.
Submitting Joiner information
We are noticing an increase in joiner errors that have been created due to mismatches in the details submitted and the data held by NHS Pensions from a previous period of employment.
Could we please ask employers that when submitting joiner details, checks are made to ensure that all personal details are accurate and spelled correctly.
Although a difference in the spelling of a name or a single digit in a National Insurance number or date of birth may seem insignificant, this creates data errors and duplicate NHS Pension records. This potentially results in inaccurate information and delays for members.