Terms & Conditions

[peterdelamothe]

As the press has widely reported, HB overpayments are out of control and hitting new highs. It is admitted that the true figures could be even higher. This could not possibly be due to the fact that the annual / six monthly reviews were stopped (against all the advice from professional benefits staff) could it?

8)

[Anonymous]

Could be.

Or could it be interventions/HBMS,etc. are more successful at finding overpayments?

Or is too much emphasis being placed on speed of processing at the expense of quality and accuracy?

[markp]

Exploding overpayments?! Harry Potter principle applies in the issue of invoices in Howler envelopes!!

Do I know what I'm doing? The jury's out on that........................

[Anonymous]

Couldn’t it? A lot of our claimants haven’t reported a change in circs since 2003, even when they’re standard claims and you’d expect their income to have gone up.

Skimming through a report of this year’s overpayments I can see quite a lot going back to 2003 or 2004.

[su]

We have had a large number of good matches from HBMS on undeclared capital…yes it is those fraud free pensioners again!!

One done recently was for over £40k overpayment going back to 1994…

[peterdelamothe]

As an assessor (its a long time ago!) I remember people used to forget which account they had declared or there were credits on their accounts etc. that would signpost other accounts. Its all very well finding these OP’s for many years ago – getting the money back is another matter. Do you have to wait a month by the way, even if the customer admits to fraud?

[Anonymous]

‘Fraid so Peter. There’s not just the admission of guilt to consider, but ‘the whole pie’, i.e. calculation of the o/p and (given CH/4234/2004) are we recovering from the right person? Its all appealable and all jolly good fun. 😀

[Author]

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