Unlinked payslips and Personal Public Service Number

Unlinked payslips occur when you do not include the employee’s Personal Public Service Number (PPSN) on the payslips submitted. This can lead to issues for employees. The missing information can cause:

  • incorrect Statements of liability to issue
  • incorrect Employment Detail Summaries to issue
  • and
  • incorrect Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI) contributions reported to Department of Social Protection.

It can also have short or long-term consequences for the employee when trying to access State benefits.

You can rectify this retrospectively by adding the PPSN to each payslip once the employee supplies their PSSN.

If you submit a payslip without a PPSN, you must submit the following details on the employee’s payslip:

  • First name
  • Surname
  • Date of birth
  • Address
  • and
  • Employer Reference Number.

Revenue use the Employer Reference and name for auto matching purposes. When reporting your employee's PPSN to Revenue for the first time, you must amend the details on all previously submitted payslips.

You must ensure that the employees ‘Employer Reference Number’ and ‘Name’ match the details on all previously submitted payslips. If these details do not match, these submissions will remain unlinked until corrected by the Employer and, or the PPSN is added.

To maintain the employees records, it is vital that employers check the information they have. Any errors in the spelling of the first name or surname and, or date of birth can be corrected on previously submitted payslips. This must be done before the submission of the PPSN for the first time. Where this is not done, you must make the amendments to the previous payslips. You must also ensure the records are correct on all future submissions.

Revenue requires your employees ‘First Name’, ‘Surname’, ‘Date of birth’ and ‘Address’ to manually match previous payslips.

Below are some possible scenarios that could occur leading to unlinked payslips: