Recommendation 30

The NAO reported that the Department cannot rule out that there may be further groups of pensioners, as yet unidentified, that have been affected by a historic underpayment. It concluded that this was in large part because the Department had not set out plans to revise its control processes for State Pension cases to ensure that underpayments are detected and recorded at the point of payment.63 As part of our previous inquiry into the underpayment of State Pension we expressed concern that senior management was not focused on designing a data strategy that detects errors in a more systematic way. The Department previously acknowledged ”an inability to pick up patterns of underpayment, which had been going on for many years”, which caused detrimental impact on those underpaid.64 We therefore challenged the Department on why it seemed to keep finding more problems and more people affected who were not getting the money that they should have already received. It told us that it considered the fact it was continuing to identify issues such as HRP demonstrated that it was “looking hard enough” to find cases of underpayment.65