CISR22630 - Authenticate customer: authentication: using ‘trace’; facility to find individual

| CISR22000 | Information contents | |—————————————————————————————————–|———————-|

This action guide starts with a contact from a customer who claims to be known to HMRC but cannot provide the usual details of UTR and NINO/IRPR and ends at the point of either

  • Successful verification as to the identity of the caller, or
  • Your decision that the caller has not supplied sufficient information to enable you to determine that they are the person concerned or are authorised to act on their behalf.

You will be most likely to use this ‘trace’ facility on receipt of a paper document that does not contain a recognised reference rather than for phone calls or face to face contact. However, the following steps must be carried out for all contacts to ensure that the caller is who they say they are and to record the contact in the Contact History.

  • Open the CIS system to obtain the ‘Identify Customer’ window.

Select [Find Individual] to go to the ‘Identify Individual’ window.

Enter details in the fields provided. You will be more likely to ‘find’ the customer if you try the searches in the following order

  • Full surname and date of birth (you can abbreviate the surname but you must enter a # symbol after the last character. The date of birth must be in this format: DDMMYYYY).
  • Full surname and postcode (you can abbreviate the surname but you must enter a # symbol after the last character. You can enter all or part of the postcode followed by a # symbol and two lines of the address).
  • Postcode and first character of surname followed by a # symbol
  • Postcode only
  • Full address excluding postcode (you must enter at least two address lines).

Select [Find] to start the search facility. Using the ‘sort by’ radio buttons you can sort the results as follows:

  • Show all in best match order - this is the default selection and will display the full list of results with the best match for each customer shown first.
  • Show all grouped by person - this will display the full results with all hits for the same customer grouped together.
  • Show only best match for each person - this will reduce the list showing only the best match for each customer.

To see more results for a particular customer select the checkbox relevant to the customer, and then select the [More Details] button. The additional details displayed should help you to establish the correct customer.

Where the ‘More Details’ window for the record confirms the trace

  • Select [OK] to go back to the ‘Identify Individual’ window

Ensure the ‘checkbox’ for the selected record in the ‘Results’ panel is selected

  • Select [OK] to return to the ‘Identify Customer’ window (the UTR for the selected record will appear in the ‘UTR’ field)
  • Ensure the appropriate selection has been made from the available options in the ‘Contact’ and ‘Channel’ drop-down lists
  • Select ‘OK’ to move to the ‘Authenticate’ window.
  1. If after viewing more details for a customer you find that they are not relevant to the contact, you must repeat the process until you identify the correct customer.

You need to take particular care when this window includes a ‘Bogus’ contact indicator - this will include a record of all suspect contacts during the last 3 months.

You now need to follow the appropriate guidance for the authentication process. For the Authentication Action Guide index, see CISR22600.

If you are unable to trace the customer or representative from the information supplied and;

  • the ‘channel type’ is ‘paper’ you should follow the steps in CISR22660: authentication of correspondence, including application forms.
  • The channel type is ‘phone’ either inbound or outbound, you should follow the steps in CISR22670 which describes the authentication process during inbound and outbound calls.