Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

Can I have some opinions on this please –

we have some cases where the claimant has been on IS but this has been terminated for some periods due to undisclosed earnings. Our fraud department have given us the wage information so that HB/CTB overpayments can be calculated.

In ‘normal’ circumstances when someone comes off IS we would request proof of income and capital, and if it wasn’t provided, suspend and then terminate the claim. In these cases, as we held them as passported we have never received capital information.

My question is, should we be obtaining evidence of capital for the periods where no IS was payable and we are having to recalculate HB/CTB entitlement? Or should we just recalculate using the earnings? I think we should get the account details as the chances are the claimant has accumalated some capital by claiming benefits and working, but the fraud team don’t seem keen on trying to get this info. If they can’t get it I am tempted to adverse inference that the capital is high enough to nil qualify them for benefit. However, if the DWP have not terminated IS due to capital, should be bother going to the trouble of trying to get it?

What do other authorities do? Only obtain evidence of the undisclosed income/capital, or insist on evidence of everything?

thanks

[Anonymous]

You could ask your Fraud team to ask the DWP if there was any tariff income in the assessment for IS. If none, problem solved? 8)

[simonh]

Unless I had reason to believe that the clt had sufficent capital to efefct the calim I would assess the claim based on the income details only. Is it too much to hope that the clt won’t qualify based on earnings alone?

[Anonymous]

I am hoping in the case I have that the earnings will nil the claimant out of benefit, but it has just raised an issue within the department, as some processing staff are refusing to calculate the overpayment without all the evidence relating to income [i:2a1064c794]and [/i:2a1064c794]capital – stating that in normal supersessions we would terminate the claim if the customer did not provide all income/capital details.

thanks for your responses

[Author]

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