The Pensions Regulator should arrive at a compromise in which schemes can decide themselves about what is included in conditional data sets, but statutory data is obligatory and must be tested and held correctly, ITM director John Broker has said.

Speaking at the Pensions Age/ITM Data and Systems half-day seminar in London, Broker said this approach would be part of an overall package of improving data and record-keeping as a whole.

"The regulator has said in the past it doesn’t intend to prescribe conditional data,” he said. “There needs to be a tougher approach on data as a whole.”

“There are still 2 to 3 million data records that have not been tested. In my experience views on data are polarised into two extremes – people who get it and keep on top of record-keeping and those that don’t. People do not see it as a priority. A lot of pensioners are overpaid or underpaid and to me that is a result of the industry not being tough enough on data standards.”

Broker said he welcomed the regulator’s case reviews into record-keeping however and said he hoped the watchdog would “penalise” those schemes which are found to have ‘poor’ levels of record-keeping.

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