Digital Apprenticeship Service - HMRC datamatching

There's a new column on the Manage Your Learners list for "Employment Status", which I think is for this, but you can't yet sort by it, it doesn't appear in the CSV download, and there are no values yet. It was supposed to be for starts from 15th April and every DAS record after that was supposed to have a status. The guidance is in the Apprenticeship Service Support area. Looks like it's just been delayed.

I think the last line of that link is the most important...

You are not required to take any action, but we would encourage you to use the new information to improve the pass rate of your HRMC checks to confirm funding eligibility.

You're a life saver as always Ruth!

I see the column and checked back the last few months and it appears blank which I'm going to take as a win for today!

Would be useful if the DAS let you search for a date range, or filtered on this column. 

I live in fear of getting a call asking why we haven't resolved an error that's on a portal we've never been told about.

We've already requested that they add the ability to filter/sort for that status, and for it to be added to the export, in anticipation of it launching.

Whilst I agree with Steve, it's not directly our problem to resolve, it might raise some data errors. Cases where there's been a takeover and the staff have been TUPEd over to a new employer but nobody told us. That might lead to insufficient funds if they leave them attached to the old DAS account (where it was levy but no money is now going in), but if they do a change of employer they'll have enough funds. Sometimes there are really complicated connected employers where they've just fundamentally used the wrong DAS account. We should tell the employers and encourage them to resolve.

I discovered recently that our own organisation only had one PAYE logged on our employer DAS account, when I know we actually have two, so I got our HR and Finance teams to add that other one. That means that any of our apprentices (employed under the PAYE that was missing) won't throw up an error with whichever provider they enrol with.

I can see this turning up all sorts of unexpected things once they actually start using it. It may be the DWP do start asking us to take action if they find large numbers of apprentice/PAYE mismatches, so I'm keen to keep an eye on it. I wonder if they've checked the data yet, maybe that's why it hasn't launched yet.

I agree Steve Hewitt however employer issues can be really tricky to resolve as we've experienced with data match issues. We've found their understanding of the DAS and the ability to communicate with DAS support team (as they won't work with us) can be a really difficult thing to navigate. The employer doesn't have many incentives to resolve these issues as often they lead to witholding the money from us! Obviously they aren't all like that, but we've had one or two and a few more who seem to drag their feet.

I'm fearful of these piling up. 

Sam Bern Make it part of your employer contract that, if you lose funding as a result of things they were meant to do but didn't, or weren't meant to do but did, that you can invoice the employer for the lost funds. I don't think we've ever had to use it, but we can point at it to encourage them to do as we've asked.