Terms & Conditions

[seanosul]

Where I am now has been asked to recover an overpayment on behalf of a Council in Cornwall. They are keen to start setting this up as they will be participating in a similar county wide project. I am just wondering if anyone has any working practices / procedures in place?

Lots of questions but not many answers.

How often is the other LA paid? Is an admin fee charged? What happens if the tenant comes off benefit? How do you do it on SX3? What about performance indicators (overpayments raised / collected)?

Any help gratefully received. Thanks

[jgwizdak]

I did one of theses a couple of years back.

We didn’t charge an admin fee.

On SX3 I created a manual adjustment to replicate the overpayment and did a weekly reclaim from ongoing benefit against that. When it was all recovered I sent a cheque to the other LA, entered the cheque on SX3, and did a contra of the original Manual adjustment. That balanced everything out.

Main problem was that the claimant kept moving and coming off HB so it took a bit of tracking.

[Anonymous]

This is something that’s been bounded around for many many years. DWP Debt Management have always believed that LA’s should do this and we should consider it before asking the DWP to recover from national benefits.

Several years ago they actually started refusing to recover for LA’s if the person was on HB in a different area. They changed that policy when we demonstrated how impossible it was to administer recoveries for lots of different LA’s.

It’s something that we as a LA have always refused to do when we have received a request from another LA, because it’s an administrative nightmare!

In Greater Manchester we have previously discussed setting up some sort of local agreement to do this, but it’s never happened and I doubt it ever will, because I can’t see how it could work. It’s something that would need administering centrally not individually for it to be feasable.

[Author]

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