A bit of history. In the old days, when we were notified of the death of a claimant we used to follow this procedure:
1)If the claimant was male and a pensioner, we would end him on the claim and replace him with his partner.
2) We would then swap his state pension with hers. The reasoning being that this was going to be nearer the true figure of her revised state pension.
3) We would the add any superannuations or private pensions to her claim, to take into acount her possible entitlement she may have had to them.
4) Add his capital to her claim.
This was a temporary measure whist we waited for a new claim form and was designed to let the customer continue to receive benefit (as opposed to suspending it) but to also limit the possibitlity any large over-payments, once her income was sorted. We wanted to make this time as painless as possible to the customer.
We no longer do this but as a throw-back tend not to end the claim but suspend whilst waiting for a new form.
Problems that I can see with this procedure are that if the claim was accuracy checked during this period, it would fail (ie it is a non-existent claim) and that any overpayment on the CTB side, during the suspension to a possible cancellation date could be classed as LA error.
I was wondering if there were any other problems in adopting this approach and how other preople were dealing with this situation.
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