The data used to produce official statistics are the same as the data extracted from the case management system on a daily basis that is used for internal reporting within Social Security Scotland.

As such, the data is checked daily for consistency with previous extracts (i.e. do applications, decisions and payments figures increase as expected over time, and are they in proportion to each other) and compared to other sources of information such as the number of payment instructions reported by the finance team.

Additional quality assurance and cleaning has been carried out on the variables used in the official statistics to:

• check for duplicate and missing application references
• check application dates, processing times and payment times are within the expected ranges
• check that payment date is present where a payment value is present
• check applicant dates of birth are within the expected range – see Age of applicant section
• check postcodes that do not match to local authorities – see Geography section
• remove of a small number of test applications which were used to test the case management system

Once the data is aggregated and copied into the publication and supporting Excel tables, the final statistics are quality assured by a different member of the statistics team. The lead statistician checks the final documents.