John Mackay

A couple of months ago I helped my mum create a Government Gateway account so that she could login and view her National Insurance record. She had some gaps and since she is due to retire within the next couple of years she decided to make a voluntary payment. She chose to pay for 1 year and we completed the online form, scanned the QR code and made the payment from her bank account. This is now reflected in her national insurance record which is great. However, she’s now decided that she’d like to make a second voluntary payment to pay for the remaining gaps to maximise her state pension. So we again logged in to her tax account, viewed the payable NI gaps, and selected the option she’d like to pay and proceeded to a declaration page. However, when we press “Agree” on the declaration page instead of being shown a QR code we get a "Sorry, we’re experiencing technical difficulties" error page and asked to try again in a few minutes. We’ve tried many times over the past couple of weeks and just keep getting this error. Is this a known issue? Should we just keep trying? Or I wondered since she’s already made a payment, and we can see the amount she needs to pay, can we manually make a bank transfer using the same account details and reference as the first payment? Any help would be appreciated.