PAYE110010 - Work management: PAYE work management system: creation of a work item

A work item is an electronic piece of work generated by the system that requires clerical action. The PAYE Service will automatically identify that a work item is required as a result of online processing or the capture of information and pass that information to the PAYE Work Management system.

The PAYE Work Management system will create a work item of the appropriate type for the particular situation or exception. A full list of work item types is listed at PAYE058 (HMRC Intranet only) - see ‘Work Items’ in the left bar Navigation Menu of this Manual.

Most work items will contain a national insurance number (NINO) or temporary reference number.

After creating a new work item, the PAYE Work Management system will look for any other work item of the same type for the same individual. When a match is found, the PAYE Work Management system will apply rules to decide whether to delete, merge, update or take no action in respect of the matched work items.

Where rules have been set for a work item type, the PAYE Work Management system will apply the ‘duplicate, merge and update’ rules (see PAYE110011).

The rules applied to the individual work item types are listed at PAYE110011.

At the point of creating the work item, the PAYE Work Management system will apply a priority score to the work item which determines how quickly that work item is presented to an operator.

The work item with the highest score will be presented first. If there are two or more work items with the same score, the oldest will be presented first.

If a particular work item remains unresolved after a certain period of time, the system will increase the score allocated to that work item.

Each work item type has its own adjustable ageing increment.

Not all work items have a priority which increases over time, as some are always considered low priority.