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Foreign bank accounts

Elliot Kent
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A question which arose the other day - is there any either legal or technical reason preventing UC or other benefit payments being made to non-UK based bank accounts? I can’t seem to find an answer.

(I can appreciate their may be issues relating to fees etc, but I suspect that is a slightly different matter.)

Mkfiftyeight
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Benefit Advisor, HARC East Sussex

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Elliot

I am not aware of anything in legislation, particularly C&P Regs which defines what is meant by “bank account” nor it has to be a UK account. 

Page 6 of “DWP and the UK Overseas Territories” is about paying pensions and reading between the lines makes for some interesting reading about historic problems and it seems a special team (overseas branch) need to make the payments..

There was a DWP reasearch paper back in 2016 “The banking needs of Universal Credit Claimants: the potential role of budgeting accounts” but nothing in it about foreign accounts, more about the problems some peopel have opening an account.

The notes accompanying paper forms tend to include info about bank accounts.  I have not come across any which say people can’t use a foreign account,.

Sorry not an answer specifically aobut UC, but DWP can pay somethings into a foreign account.

Mkfiftyeight
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Sorry meant to include this link in previous post

<https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/214330/uk-overseas-territories.pdf>

Stainsby
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Welfare rights adviser - Plumstead Community Law Centre

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Exportable benefits such as retirement pensions are regularly paid into foreign bank accounts.

Elliot Kent
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Thanks for this, which is interesting and confirms my suspicion that there is no legal reason for benefits to be paid into foreign accounts.

In the case which raised this, the claimant has come from abroad and does not have a UK bank account, however they may still have a bank account from their country of origin. So whilst they are getting their UK account set up, I couldn’t see any obvious reason why it would not be possible to have the funds to be paid into their existing foreign account.

But the UC claim form (as well as the ChB and PIP claim forms) only appear to provide the option to give a sort code and account number, which would be be no good for a foreign account and instead you would want to provide an IBAN. I was curious as to what the approach is in such a case and there appears to be very little information available about it aside from the above.

Va1der
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HMRC has a bank liaisons team, which amongst other things helps with admin of TC payments to foreign bank accounts: https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/tax-credits-manual/tcm0282020
Although, there appears to be some limit on which countries they can make payment to: https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/tax-credits-manual/tcm0282100

For the countries not covered there may well be technical or policy obstacles (international banking arrangements etc). With DWP using different systems to HMRC, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional technical barriers for DWP benefits.

Would expect HMRC to be able to do it for CB using the same systems as for TC though, but haven’t found any info on CB.