Recommendation 7

Given the nature of the underpayments identified there must be a risk that similar, unidentified errors exist elsewhere in the State Pension caseload. For example, the NAO report states that “the Department did not find any significant evidence that it had failed to properly process cases where a pensioner had notified it of their divorce”. However, Sir Steve Webb has told us he believes the scope of the 8 Underpayments of the State Pension correction exercise is too narrow. He believes that the exercise should be extended to included divorced women as he has identified several cases of underpayments to date where similar manual processing errors have occurred. Recommendation: The Department should write to the Committee to explain how it has assessed the risk of systemic underpayments to divorced women. It should also explain how it will review other detected underpayments to assess whether there is a systemic cause and take steps to extend the correction exercise as required. The Department should provide this Committee with a detailed description of the lessons learnt from this episode, including how it responds to concerns and queries from the public. Underpayments of the State Pension 9 1 Administration of State Pension