Any UC experts to help with this situation?

[TrudgingTreacle]

I migrated from TC to UC two months ago.
In January, I reported my earnings manually because my employer didn’t report. This was fine and first payment was all sorted without issue.

My employer updated for the first month and I saw on my hmrc account that earnings were up to date for January.

In February, my employer seemingly reported both the first month and the second month’s wages as paid on the same pay date in February (but they are listed as separate payments).

In my tax account it shows:

15th January: £xxx

15th February: £xxx
15th February : £xxx

I was only paid my usual wage in February and my payslip reflects this. I did not receive two wages. My assessment period leaves a decent margin outside of pay date.

UC have therefore reduced my entitlement hugely for this month. I raised an RTI dispute but I’ve heard nothing back yet.

I spoke to my employer who says that they’ve checked their reports and it’s all correct so there’s nothing they can do.

I’m over £600 short for this month and I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ve read online that unless hmrc are corrected, UC won’t change the payment. My employer won’t change their submission because according to all of their reports, their submission was correct. Yet my hmrc record clearly shows an error.

Is there anything I can do about this?

who did you contact within your company? Your manager or payroll - if there is a payroll? Can you print out the sheet, and show or email to payroll and explain these leaves you in a difficult position of £600 down on your benefits due to this showing?

@MikeRafone it was payroll. I gave them a copy of my hmrc printout but they say their reports all show correctly. I explained the impact and they’re going to check again, but I’m worried that if their reports are correct, how I’ll prove the error to UC.

Ask payroll for a print out of your pay to show U.C. that payroll only paid you once and not twice - this could force their hand if they have made an error in the inputting

as an aside - real time should work really well, as HMRC have the information flagged if the pay is different - but if employers don't input correctly ( which does happen, and for anyone not on benefits its not an issue) things go wrong very quickly.

@MikeRafone I’ll visit payroll again on my lunch break and ask them for a print out. There has to be an error somewhere as it’s shown in my tax account. I think this information comes from RTI? So it must be a payroll error?

The RTI dispute can take a while to sort unfortunately. Your employer needs to be reporting correctly in future, it's their fault this has happenned.

In the meantime, you could ask for a budgeting loan from UC. That could help with the impact of having less money. Obv you'll have to pay it back, but it will help this month.

Also make sure you put in writing to payroll that thos can't happen again. It's not okay when you're relying on UC for them to make mistakes.

I think earnings have to have been very low to qualify for a budgeting loan.

You could perhaps ask your company for a loan to tide you over until this mistake is corrected?

Hopefully you got somewhere with payroll at lunchtime

Thank you everyone. I visited payroll at lunch time yesterday who weren’t able to print the reports there and then but would see what they could do for next week.

However, yesterday I had a message on my journal to say that the RTI dispute team had responded with “RTI feed has been updated”. UC are paying me the underpayment in 3 working days. Disaster averted!

I really hope this does not happen again next month. I assume this error has come from my company payroll.

TrudgingTreacle

could print it out there and then… yeah cos it would show they fucked up

quick get this sorted

now suddenly it’s sorted and UC can pay the benefit as now it shows you didn’t get paid twice

will it happen next month?

payroll can’t afford to keep fucking this up as it does have serious consequences and questions are already being asked