Advice Needed Please - Originally jt claimant and now sole claimant

Kingfisher42

Hello - am wondering if any one can advice me on this please?

My partner and I split up in January this year. I phoned the TC office at the time and they closed the jt claim that we had and opened up a new sole claim for me.
I have now received the form to finalise our jt salary figures for the year 08/09 and I know that our final figure upto January 09 will be higher than the figure I have provided as an estimate for that year, so I'm sure that we will have been overpaid.

I don't have a problem with this and will willingly pay it back, my only concern is that I won't be able to pay it back in one go and will probably need to ask them if I can set up some sort of repayment plan to pay back what I can reasonably afford each month.

I am really worried though that they will just take the overpayment from the credits that they are currently paying to me for this year either by stopping payments until the overpayment is repaid or reducing them by an amount that I can't really afford to lose.

Does anybody have any information or advice about this?

Are the claims treated independantly in which case they wouldn't be able to take from my sole claim to pay off a joint one?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

lorelai34

You're correct, if you have an overpayment from an old joint claim they can't recover it from your new single claim as you and your ex-partner are both jointly responsible for the overpayment. There are diff re-payment options, if you phone them you'll be able to work somethin out.

bestpud

This may be totally different but, when I changed my claim from a joint to a single one in February, they took time to stop the payments, and they retrieved the overrun payments from my single claim.

It basically meant my ex had the money in his account while I lost £10 a week off my claim until April. :mad:

Like, I said, it may be different, but it shows they can 'merge' the claims.

Kingfisher42

Thank you both for replying.

bestpud - when you say that they took time to stop the payments, do you mean that they were still paying out on your joint claim after you had told them to change it to a single claim?

bestpud

Kingfisher42 wrote: »

Thank you both for replying.

bestpud - when you say that they took time to stop the payments, do you mean that they were still paying out on your joint claim after you had told them to change it to a single claim?

Yes, only by two payments though as I informed them asap after we split. I guess it takes time to stop it.

The first week was fine as we were still sorting stuff then but the second week went to my ex and I 'paid' for it!