Ireland Personal Public Service (PPS) Number Application

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from the sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not been completed against the live, authenticated MyWelfare online screens — only against the published guidance and the downloadable REG1 paper form. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Source examined

• Document (id, version): ie/dsp/pps-number-application / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
• Authority: Department of Social Protection (DSP), Ireland
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-social-protection/services/get-a-personal-public-service-pps-number/
• Official form: REG1, edition 00K 04-22 (April 2022) — https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/application-form-pps-number-reg1.pdf
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Note on the catalog's original candidate source. discovery/catalog.json originally listed .../services/how-to-apply-for-a-personal-public-service-pps-number/ as this candidate's candidateSource. That path now returns HTTP 404; the live page is .../services/get-a-personal-public-service-pps-number/ (confirmed 200, matching title "Get a Personal Public Service (PPS) Number"). This document was authored against the live page and the catalog entry has been corrected to match.

What was confirmed against the source

• Channel and residency branching (applicationChannel, residency): confirmed from the gov.ie "How to Apply" section — online (MyWelfare + MyGovID) is available to residents of the island of Ireland and to residents abroad; REG1 by post is the fallback and the third-party channel.
• REG1 item set (items 1-19). Extracted directly from the REG1 PDF's decompressed content-stream text (no PDF-to-text tool was available; streams were zlib-inflated and Tj/TJ parenthesis-strings decoded manually, per the established extraction method used for other paper-form schemas in this registry). Confirmed items: title, surname, first names, birth first names/surname, mother's birth surname, date of birth, gender, address (with county and Eircode), telephone numbers, email, reason for application, nationality, country of birth (and county of birth if Ireland), most recent prior country of residence and its identifier, pre-1979 Irish National Insurance Number, and previous Irish address.
• Reason-for-application options (reasonForApplication enum): confirmed from the gov.ie "Why you need a PPS Number" list (employment, driving licence, social welfare payment, registering a child's birth, SAFE PASS training, other public services, education enrolment, Irish passport application, marriage and residence, specified-body service).
• Identity-evidence categories (identityBasis, identityDocument): confirmed from the gov.ie "Evidence of your identity" rules, which branch by citizenship basis (Irish-born, Irish born in NI/UK-born, naturalised, foreign-birth-registered, other EU/EEA, non-EU/EEA) each with distinct accepted documents.
• Address-evidence rules (addressEvidenceDocument): confirmed — a document showing name and address, no older than 3 months, from the listed document types.
• Overseas-applicant extras (reasonEvidenceDocument, overseasApplicantQuestionnaireDocument, authoriseThirdPartyToReceiveNumber, thirdPartyConsentDocument): confirmed from "Applying for a PPS Number if you are living outside Ireland" — evidence of the reason, a completed RM2 questionnaire, and a signed consent form if the number is to be released to a third-party representative.
• The Declaration block (signature, date, witness signature/date) and the "For official use" block (CAP ID, date PPS Number allocated) were deliberately excluded from fields, consistent with this registry's convention (e.g. us/irs/individual-income-tax-return-1040's signature block): they are part of the act of signing/submission or are government-only outputs, not applicant-supplied data an agent collects.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• Field requiredness for items without an explicit conditional note (e.g. mothersBirthSurname, telephone numbers) was inferred from the form's layout, not confirmed against an authoritative field-by-field requiredness specification. The REG1 PDF marks conditional items in prose ("if different", "if applicable") but does not tag every item as strictly required or optional.
• The MyWelfare online screens themselves were not reviewed (the service is authenticated and requires a MyGovID account); this document is derived from the guidance describing the online channel and the paper REG1 form, not an independently captured screen-by-screen review of MyWelfare, mirroring the caveat already recorded for ie/dfa/passport-renewal-adult.
• Eircode validation pattern (^[A-Za-z0-9]{3} ?[A-Za-z0-9]{4}$) reflects the general public Eircode format, not a pattern cross-checked against the REG1 form or MyWelfare's own input validation.
• Form REGM1 (child PPS Number application) and the birth-registration automatic-allocation path are out of scope for this document; see discovery/catalog.json for a potential future sibling schema.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance this document to status: verified, a reviewer with an active MyGovID/MyWelfare account applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field comparison against the live authenticated online screens, step 3 flow comparison), resolves the requiredness caveats above, ships any resulting change as a new schema version per VERSIONING.md (immutability — never edit a published version), and records the outcome here with status: verified and a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy. This v1.0.0 record stays as the authoring provenance.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months): identity-document rules and channel availability are the kind of detail that changes with policy updates. Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.