Housing Benefit Overpayment

fluffymovie

Rabbitix.
Sorry for delay but not been on for a while.

The regulations about overpayments are as complicated to administer as they are for those in receipt of benefit.
Basically, an overpayment can be caused for a number of reasons, Local Authority error being one of them. This basically means that say you declared earnings on your claim form and the council missed it and paid you benefit based on nil income, if they find out later, they can class the error as LA error and still seek to recover it from you if they think that you would have known you were being overpaid. Their argument would mainly be that they send you notification letters which you need to check and notify them of any errors.
If you have genuine concerns, you can make a complaint to your council and they have to look at it. If you feel that your claim has been wrongly dealt with you need to make a formal complaint. If you are still not satisfied, you need to go to the Local Government Ombudsman on the basis of maladministration.
I have worked in Housing Benefit for 8 years and I still make mistakes. The people administering claims are only human after all but I would doubt that it is with the intention of making your life more difficult than it already is. I would hope that the majority of staff are like my team, in the job because we want to help. Trust me, the names I have been called when I haven't been able to assist some people, do make you wonder why you bother!
I hope that you get it all sorted out. You should ask the department to lower recovery level if you are still on benefit and always use the CAB. In our experience, we find that they really know their stuff!

real1314

Deleted. Dredged up old thread.