Request

a) Whether the NHSBSA conduct mandatory follow-up checks on whether the amount issued in pension refunds is correct or not ?

In addition, I hereby serve on the NHSBSA a Freedom of Information request (FOIR) for it to provide me with data for the following:

b) The number and percentage of checks carried out on all pension refunds between 1st December 2020 - 1st December 2023

c) The number and percentage of errors identified on the amount of pension refunds issued between 1st December 2020 - 1st December 2023

d) The financial amount that was overpaid by the pension department between 1st December 2020 - 1st December 2023

e) The financial amount that was underpaid (as in my case) between 1st December 2020 - 1st December 2023

Response

Question A

When a refund is processed, the system will select cases to be checked. These cases will then be checked by a quality coach, with any relevant feedback provided to the administrator who processed the case if any errors/issues are found.

Question B

A total of 129,136 refunds were completed between 01/12/2020 and 01/12/2023, and 2,159 (1.67%) were checked as part of the quality assurance process.

Question C

A total of 4 errors were identified (0.003%).

Question D

As your preceding questions relate to refunds, we have interpreted this question to mean that you also want information on refunds only for this question, as well as question E. If this was not your intention, please get in touch.

For the period of 1st December 2020 – 1 December 2023 there were overpayments totalling £760,365.23 relating to refunds. Please note this does not necessarily mean that this is due to an error on the part of NHS Pensions (NHSP). This could be due to a variety of reasons, such as receiving revised information from an employer, or an incorrectly completed RF12 (application refund form) for example – incorrect bank details being provided to NHSP.

Question E

It is not easy to identify if an underpayment occurred without manual interrogation of the records, narrowed down to 10,399 cases which had some kind of adjustment made on them.

Manual interrogation of these records would take 5 – 10 minutes per case to locate any potential underpayment from the documents held on file and to record the amount. Therefore, based on the lower estimate of 5 minutes per record, it would take 866.5 hours (10,399x5/60) to locate, retrieve and extract information on whether each case involved an underpayment of a refund.

We would also need to define what is meant by underpaid, because as above – a refund could be revised for other reasons than NHSP processing the refund incorrectly. Please note – this figure will contain both underpayment and overpayment cases, we are unable to split them without manual interrogation.

Therefore, I estimate that the cost of complying with this question would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.  Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request, and I will not be processing this part of your request further. Unfortunately, there is no subset of the data which we could provide within the cost limit.

Please note both automated system refunds and refunds requiring manual intervention have been included in the volume of refunds completed.