Reply To: Late notified beneficial changes
See my thread about a similar issue from last year https://hbinfo.org/forums/topic/reg29a/
As John says, the ‘late notification rule’ comes from reg 8 and only applies to beneficial changes, i.e. increases to the award. In the case you describe, it sounds as though that is what you have – reduced earnings = more HB.
But….without knowing the date of the change you can’t decide whether it was notified late. You could argue that finding out via VEP means that the clmt has failed their duty to report, and that it must therefore be a late notified change. There’s an argument there about whether VEP counts as ‘notifying’ or not.
You either need more information from the clmt – when did this change? etc – or you need to just ‘refresh’ the earnings. Using VEP/WURTI on its own is fraught – it was intended to help identify overpayments where changes had not been reported, and for LAs to ask more questions before making a decision. As the thread shows, assuming the date of payment was the date of change isn’t reliable and the date of the new estimate of earnings is usually the date to use.
In your case I think I would have just updated the earnings estimate from the date I was doing it.
This sounds like a ‘local procedure’….