Overpayments

We usually take back overpayments of Council Tax Benefit from your Council Tax account. This means you will get a new Council Tax bill asking you to pay more.

How do overpayments happen?

Overpayments occur if we decide we should have been paying a lower amount of benefit.

This will happen if we discover we have made a mistake in our assessment of your benefit, or if we find out that we were unaware of something that would have affected your entitlement. The most common reasons for overpayments are:

• You may have given us wrong information
• You may not have told us something we needed to know
• You may have been slow to tell us of a change
• We may have been slow to deal with something you told us
• We may have made a mistake
• In the case of Council Tax Benefit, we pay benefit to cover until the end of the financial year. It's quite likely that something will change during the year and we find that we've paid too much, or too little, for the rest of the year.

How we inform you

First we will write to tell you the new, lower amount of benefit you are entitled to or we'll tell you when you stopped being entitled. We also tell you, usually in a separate letter, how much you've been overpaid altogether. This letter:

• May tell you how we're getting the money back
• Or may say that we'll be in touch later about paying it back. If so, we'll write to you again to tell you what we're doing or to ask you to send us the money, or to tell you we'll take no further action