Overpayments
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.
Can we ask for the money back?
- Yes, if it was your fault
-
Yes, if it was not our fault
-
Yes, even if it was our fault, if you could have
realised you were being overpaid. For example, if you got a pay
rise you should expect your benefit to go down. If your benefit
hasn't changed you should realise something is wrong
-
No, if it's our fault and you couldn't have realised
you were getting too much
How we recover payments
- If you are still on Housing
Benefit, we can take money out of each week's benefit to recover
the overpayment
- If we owe you arrears of benefit,
we can hold on to the money and use it to repay your
overpayment
- We may send you an invoice asking
you to make arrangements to repay the overpayment
- If we've been paying your benefit
to a private landlord or housing association we may ask them to
repay the money
- We can ask the Benefits Agency to
take money out of your social security benefits
How we tell you about
overpayments
We have to tell you about overpayments and the action that we take
on them.
First we will write to tell you the new, lower amount of
benefit you're 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