Data Issues

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• A66 & A67 for 10-11 (3 posts)

• Jon.Eaton said 1 year, 5 months ago:

  I'm now working through our first ER return of the year and have come across a small problem with a validation rule for A67 and the official ILR guidance notes as there is a direct contradiction.

  I have filled in A66 for some apprenticeships with the code '98 – Not known / not provided'.

  Now, according to the ILR guidance if the record is not ESF co-financed or part of the unemployed contract I should leave 67 blank
  "If the learning aim is not a Programme for the Unemployed, ESF funded or used
  for ESF matching then this field is not required and a null value of 00 must be
  entered"

  But leaving it blank then violates validation rule A66_A67_4
  "If the employment status on day before starting learning aim is 'Not known/not provided', the length of unemployment before starting ESF project must be 'Not known/not provided'"

  I'm assuing either the ILR spec is wrong or that the LIS validation rule is wrong, because if I do what I'm told in the spec then I break a rule.

  I know the easy way around this is to set A67 to '98 – Not known / not provided' which I will do.

  But can someone confirm that I'm not going mad and that something is wrong somewhere. Also if someone from the IA can confirm that we will not be punished for submitting data in a field that indicates it should be left blank?

  Hope that makes sense

  Many thanks

  Jon

• Alan Taws said 1 year, 5 months ago:

  Before this year the answer was to leave A66 blank as both A66 and A67 are linked to ESF and should either be both completed or both left blank depending on whether or not the aim is ESF matched/co-financed or not.
  But the new spec says that A66 is now required for all aims even though the description says "To identify what the learner was doing prior to joining the ESF programme"… clearly this description is out of date if A66 is now required for non esf matched aims.
  Definite contradictions there but have you tried leaving A66 blank?

• Anita said 1 year, 5 months ago:

  Jon / Alan

  There does appear to be a conflict between the validation for fields A66 and A67 so we will work on a resolution for this issue. In the meantime, as you say, you will need to use code 98 in A67.

  A66 must be completed for all ER learning aims (except the programme aim) starting on or after 01/08/2009 so it is not possible to use the null value.

  Regards

  Anita