Pay: employer obligations

The Department for Communities (DfC) requires that a supporting payment schedule for Direct Earnings Attachment (DEA) be completed and issued in order to ensure that the correct payment is allocated to the correct debtor account. This schedule is only required if you are making one overall payment in respect of several employees. However, if you are making a single DEA payment by cheque, you must send a payment schedule.

For a single DEA payment, please ensure that you include your employee's National Insurance number and not their name.

DfC Debt Management has introduced an email route to receive payment schedules from employers, this is the preferred way for payment schedules to be sent.

Download the payment schedule template for DEA (XLSX, 82K).

For data security reasons the data required for the email payment schedule is slightly different to that on the paper schedule. By restricting the data recorded on the email payment schedule DfC Debt Management will still have enough information to correctly allocate payments to our customer records, whilst minimising the risk of personal data being fraudulently used should the email fall into the hands of a third party. Schedules do not need to be encrypted before emailing.

The postal route for sending payment schedules remains in place and a schedule template for use when forwarding schedules is available at appendix 2 of the DEA: a guide for employers (PDF, 1.0MB).