Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

Am I alone in thinking that Pension Service seem to be riding roughshod over all the normal verification and claims maintenance procedures?

Firstly, I read that their new electronic claims facility from October (which will include HB and CTB) will see an end to supplementary forms for the gathering in of non-dep and private rental information and that they will ‘record’ this info during the telephone claim (????) and LAs are obliged to accept what they forward on.No mention though as to how this will be verified.

Secondly, I now read that they will allow cases that should have had the Assessed Income Figure and associated Assessed Income Period to run on using five year old information until they get round to reviewing them.

Down through the years, LAs have been hammered by BFI if verification was not sound and by auditors if benefits had been allowed to run on without an in year check (prior to abolition of benefit periods that would have had a subsidy claim qualified).

TPS seem to be a law unto themselves but even with all these ‘easements’ their PC take up target has formally been reduced from 3.2 million to 2.7 million.

Pity BFI are not around to scrutinise TPS’s cavalier approach to gateway checks and claims maintenance.Meanwhile the Housing Benefit (Accuracy)Review team record as an error any HB/CTB claim which is wrong by a penny, even where the authority has uprated using percentage increases as approved by DWP in their uprating circulars.

As for their co-operation with LAs on fraud referrals, it appears in many parts of the country to be non-existant now.

I raised such concerns on a previous thread but it generated no responses, so perhaps I am alone in my thinking on this.

[david kearney]

Your’e not alone, but we are all going to have to accept that a policy decision has been made to accept claims with little verification, on the possibly reasonable grounds that most people are honest (whatever fraud managers might think) and those that aren’t will get picked up in the data matches at some point.

DWP havent verified capital under 3k for years now. As far as passported customers are concerned we process the claims on the basis that income and capital has been verified elsewhere. Might not have been done properly but not our call anymore. Convincing the long standing assessors to please stop asking for bank accounts is a different matter entirely mind!

[Anonymous]

We are certainly not obliged to accept the rent information recorded during the telephone call as the pensioner will be sent a supplementary rent form and a stamped address envelope to return to us. I don’t know where you got your information from. Regarding non-deps, all that has changed (as I see it) is that pensioner will no longer have to complete a separate form as the questions will be asked during the telephone “gather”. Non-deps, in most cases, have no relevance to pension credit so they won’t have verified anything. There is nothing to stop us verifying anything that TPS haven’t already done for the purposes of the pension credit claim, so again I’m not sure where you got your information from.

Re bank statements etc: We don’t ask for them at the new claim stage but on review we do. There is nothing legally to stop us doing this and I can always justify it if asked to explain myself, on the grounds that DWP aren’t verifying capital for 5 years or more and it is surprising what [i:5e1c11fa92]income [/i:5e1c11fa92]bank statements can reveal.

[Author]

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