Catalogue of Errors Led To $1.36 Billion of State Pension Underpayments (bbc.com) 36
Repeated human errors made for years were to blame for a scandal which led to more than 1bn pound of state pensions not being paid, a report has concluded. BBC: The National Audit Office (NAO) said 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, were underpaid pensions because outdated computer systems led to mistakes. Among them was 74-year-old Irene Wise, who said women like her were "short-changed" for years. The government said everyone would receive what they were owed. However, the report raises huge questions for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over the way the state pension system functions and the mistakes that led to such a massive shortfall in payments. Reacting to the report, Meg Hillier, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said: "This is not the first widespread error we have seen in the DWP in recent years. Correcting these errors comes at great cost to the taxpayer. "The DWP must provide urgent redress to those affected and take real action to prevent similar errors in future."
The problem relates to the "old" state pension system where married women who had a poor pension in their own right could claim a 60% basic state pension based on their husband's record of contributions. A review is taking place to trace those affected by systemic failures to award these pension rises, stretching back to 1985. But only some women are being fully paid. Others will only be able to claim for 12 months of missed payments. The DWP is expecting to pay the affected pensioners it can trace a total of 1.05bn pound, at an average of 8,900 pound per pensioner affected. That exercise will cost the taxpayer 25m pound in staff costs and will not be completed until the end of 2023. An estimated 40,000 affected women have already died.
The problem relates to the "old" state pension system where married women who had a poor pension in their own right could claim a 60% basic state pension based on their husband's record of contributions. A review is taking place to trace those affected by systemic failures to award these pension rises, stretching back to 1985. But only some women are being fully paid. Others will only be able to claim for 12 months of missed payments. The DWP is expecting to pay the affected pensioners it can trace a total of 1.05bn pound, at an average of 8,900 pound per pensioner affected. That exercise will cost the taxpayer 25m pound in staff costs and will not be completed until the end of 2023. An estimated 40,000 affected women have already died.
I got a better one: "The Beating of a Spammer" (Score:1)
We just put anon spammers in a ring and... well you get the point. You would be first!
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:4, Insightful)
Those would be some pretty trash Marines.
I assume you never served. People who served in the armed forces are generally better people than you.
Re: (Score:2)
I think those big marines make his pee pee hard.
Re: "The Beating of a Spammer" (Score:2)
But you're the one who propagated the troll's Subject. It must want your attention. (Either that or it likes respawning each time it gets nuked.)
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:2)
That dolt also associates conservatives with Marines because he thinks both are dumb. That's an insult to the United States Marine Corps.
"Outdated Computers" to blame? I doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
The National Audit Office (NAO) said 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, were underpaid pensions because outdated computer systems led to mistakes.
As the saying goes, computers are dumb. They only know what you tell them. So I really doubt that it was the operating systems or hardware... not matter the age... that's at fault here. It' probably data entry error, or a human error in the writing of the software.
Re: "Outdated Computers" to blame? I doubt it (Score:2)
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Plus, the people who programmed it were probably axed in an attempt to save money, leaving unqualified operators to deal with the errors.
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Axed? A lot of these systems are so old that a lot of the people that wrote them are likely dead by now.
The financial sector in general just seems to be awash with old software. Granted, most of it does work just fine (this example notwithstanding), but that's not because its quality code (particularly by modern development standards) but rather that it's just had decades to find and track down any bug that might pop up. And even though its working there's often few if any people left who truly understan
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But if there's justice in the world, then they're still alive and getting underpaid on their pensions.
No, wait. More justice if they JUST died after being underpaid on their pensions for years. That way it's too late to make it up to them.
I'm not saying that I want them dead. It's just that it's just that way.
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Of course they are dead. How do you think they'd survi...
Oh...
Yes, of course. They were so old they died of natural reasons.
Re: "Outdated Computers" to blame? I doubt it (Score:2)
Any system intended to model legislature is doomed. If you properly model the problem you are left with a series of holes and ambiguities the lawmakers never gave a moment's thought. Only through stable regulation and years of development can these systems become reliable and efficient.
Re: "Outdated Computers" to blame? I doubt it (Score:5, Informative)
This gives a brief overview as to how complex the situation is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The problem with the computer system is that it is unable to properly account for all the none contribution National Insurance credits that you can receive. Things like a married woman being able to claim credits from her husband.
The issue is that politicians keep making changes without accounting for the updates needed to the systems so the correct pension can be calculated for any given individual.
Re: "Outdated Computers" to blame? I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
So true. I wrote an HR module a few years ago (only handling time entry, overtime, time off, leaves, and employment history) and it's crazy how insanely complicated the employment rules are. For example, in this case different classes of employees were entitled to different overtime rules depending both on government regulation and company policies, and not only do employee classes change over time, but on top of that both the regulation and policies change over time. Also, the time-off entitlements change regularly, and have changed multiple times during the pandemic with weird rules and exceptions. Some things are tracked by calendar year, some stuff by years of employment, but some leaves may or may not count towards certain things based on years of employment and some may count. It doesn't matter how much you try to make the system flexible, the government or management will come up with a new rule that won't be expressible in your system of rules, and you'll have to end up making a code change. If you tried to express the set of possible rules that could exist so you could draw a circle around them, the circle would be of infinite radius. It's nuts.
What's also crazy - most of the people doing it by hand in HR don't even know all the rules and will give you different answers to the same question if you phrase it differently. They often just use rule-of-thumb and shortcuts. It's a programmer's nightmare.
It was an interesting project though.
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I'm pretty much working on the exact same thing right now (time entry/leave tracking/etc) and its killing me.
What's really aggravating is that these people will complain about something as if its an obvious bug when no one indicated some special case needed to be done.
I literally have hounded them over and over: look at the basic use case of the system (it handles 90% of normal employees), and indicate in writing any potential deviations that need to be accounted for. No (or minimal) response.
Then a week
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Outdated in this sense means that the computers where simply unable to calculate the correct state pension because nobody had updated the software to take account of new rules in how the pension should be calculated.
In the UK if you work you pay "National Insurance" as a kind of tax. Contrary to popular opinion it has nothing to do with the NHS having being introduced by the Liberal government of 1911 over 30 years before the NHS was founded.
It had two main purposes. First provided you have made sufficient
Shouldn't matter if any have died (Score:2, Insightful)
That missing money is apart of the estate of all the women that died, and should be split amongst all of the people that the dead women specified passing along sets to in wills.
An obligation is an obligation.
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Perhaps best if you don't comment on things you don't understand. The UK state pension doesn't work this way.
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Yes, whoosh indeed, but I think you just demonstrated whose head this story's gone over. You continue to show that you don't understand another country's state pension system. Hint: there is no defined pot of money that can be passed on to the people of your choosing, but instead a system in place that recongnises that traditionally one spouse in a marriage financed the other in their partnership and thus the correct thing to do is provide the widow(er) with the continued financial support of the dead per
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It seems remarkable to me that I should be defending SuperKendall, but it appears you have basic problems in reading comprehension. Or perhaps understanding the concepts of basic arithmetic.
SuperKendall's point is that, had the widow(er)s received the correct National Insurance payments during their lifetime, the value of their estate at the time of their death would have been greater. Hence, their heirs would have inher
Re: Whoosh (Score:2)
There is no pot of money.
But thanks for the laugh re: defending superkendall
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That's your argument: "there is no pot of money"?
When someone dies, their assets become an estate. What's a deceased person's estate if not a "pot of money"?
Re: Whoosh (Score:2)
The UK state pension isnâ(TM)t an asset. It doesnâ(TM)t work that way, and canâ(TM)t work that way. Size/amount of contributions are irrelevant. Contributions donâ(TM)t even go towards your own pension, but fund the current recipients. Itâ(TM)s not like a private pension.
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No one is saying the state pension it is an asset. That's a strawman argument you are making.
What we are saying is that, had the pensioner received the correct amount of state pension (more than they actually received) during their lifetime, their estate, at the time of their death would be worth more.
No surprise here in the UK (Score:3)
This is not surprising to those of us in the UK - at least the more realistic among us, which also makes us the very cynical among us.
The DWP has an ongoing record of incompetence, inefficiency, and also malice (towards the young or anyone receiving social welfare payments). Understaffing, underfunding, and focusing the remaining staff on ensuring that payments are denied to anyone unworthy of them has left a department which regularly denies payments based on racism, contempt for the sick and disabled, arbitrary decisions, failure to follow the bureaucratic labyrinth exactly, or just plain incompetence.
We're talking about a department that deliberately withdraws welfare payments from people too sick to attend frequent official meetings, until they starve to death. Underpaying women pensioners is, unfortunately, only one of their lesser evils.
Britons in Commonwealth countries (Score:3)
If you think this is bad, the way Britons who've settled in Commonwealth countries is even worse. The UK government certainly has form when it comes to paying pensions. In this case, the state pension is frozen at the level it was on the date the person emigrated, often decades ago. From Australia to Canada, there are expat Britons now living in poverty and a major burden on their new homes, not receiving a fair pension that they were promised from the system that they paid in to. If two people moved to North America and one settled in Detroit, and the other a few miles away in Windsor, Ontario, the American would receive the full pension, the Canadian a fraction of it. It makes no sense. Succesive UK governments have shown little desire to amend the arrangements with the relevant countries, which is frankly immoral.
£, Slashdot (Score:1)
£, Slashdot. British pounds. It has a currency symbol, here it is again in case you missed it:
£
Not pounds. £
Every time I see a story on Slashdot that needs to quote a number in currency, US dollars get $ - even in the title of this article where you so helpfully converted the figure to $1.36 billion - then used the word "pound" everywhere £ should have been used.
Also "cost the taxpayer 25m pound" and many other instances here are grammatically incorrect - if you must use the word ins
Re: £, Slashdot (Score:1)
You should have used â
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Ever since I moved from the UK to the US, someone has stolen the £ symbol from my keyboards. I had to copy and paste from your post.
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Not a matter of U.S. bias, just that the UK is a little island with small 67 million population. When speaking of minor countries there is no reason to take the effort of copying and pasting their silly little currency symbol or heaven forbid look up arcane key strokes when it's easier to just say pound, quid, nicker, nugget, etc.
The place is going into the shitter with brexit, soon their currency and economy won't be in the news at all.
Take some colon blow, pedant (Score:1)
Yeah and US currency has a symbol for it, but that doesn't stop people from writing out the word dollars. Do you also get your undies in a bunch when someone writes out United Kingdom instead of abbreviating it as UK? Fortunately there's medication [youtube.com] you can take to alleviate the retentiveness that produced that pointless pedantry.
UK (Score:2)