Housing Benefit claim & overpay from employer

Lady_gaga

Rickee wrote: »

Well you just saw an opportunity to highlight someone's naivity/stupidity and took the bull by the horns there didn't you?

My wife used to work for the company that I work for and thought that the standard was six months at full pay. I can't really blame her for it as I found it slightly ridiculous that the legal requirement transpired to be six weeks of 90% before going down to just over £500 a month.

The company she worked for sent a letter which wasn't read and that was as far as it went. All we thought we needed to budget for was the drop in income we were expecting when the six months was up.

Obviously, hindsight suggests we should have checked things out properly, we're now sitting pretty with a £2,000 debt and no money to pay it back with. Thanks for pointing it out though.

And there was your BIG mistake...

How can you hold someone else responsible for what your admitting is your own mistake?! you had the money at that time and it will be counted as income for HB purposes.

Rickee

Lady_gaga wrote: »

And there was your BIG mistake...

How can you hold someone else responsible for what your admitting is your own mistake?! you had the money at that time and it will be counted as income for HB purposes.

Absouloutely, but the whole point of this thread was to clarify the legal standing of the money that was paid in error considering it needs to be paid back.

If I asked for someone to point out where we had gone wrong, what we should have done differently, etc that's exactly what I would have asked but I haven't so I'm not sure why you've decided to make the contribution that you have.

I've already mentioned previously that her company have admitted liability for the error that occurred and apologised profusely for the mistake. They have admitted the mistake and that's how I can hold them responsible. Quite happy to take some of the responsibility because we should have checked everything and I wish we did, however, it doesn't change the situation that we're in or my opinion that the overpayment should be not be treated as income.

terryw

Just another thought here to assist you in trying to explain this to the HB people.
Presumably when these incorrect payments were made by the employer, income tax would have been deducted. When they have recalculated the true amount due, again income tax would have to be involved in the calculation, otherwise you would end up paying income tax on an amount that you didn't effectively receive.

Rickee

terryw wrote: »

Just another thought here to assist you in trying to explain this to the HB people.
Presumably when these incorrect payments were made by the employer, income tax would have been deducted. When they have recalculated the true amount due, again income tax would have to be involved in the calculation, otherwise you would end up paying income tax on an amount that you didn't effectively receive.

I thought that the tax would nil itself out and the company would log it with them as an overpayment anf they would be able to claim a refund. We're yet to receive the wifes P45 so I'll be checking that to see how much it says she's earned and payed in tax for the year...

uganda

I have cut and paste the following from the PM I sent you Rickee. I am posting it here in case you see this first and so that others can see it:


It seems to me that the authority didn't do an awful lot wrong in the first instance, but now that you have proved to them that your average earnings for the period were actually a lot less that you were initially paid, they really ought to take the broad view and simply assess on the actual average.

What that would mean would be that even though you received more income in say, weeks 1-8, you will receive less in weeks 9-14 but get less HB/CTB (presuming they paid you for weeks 1-8 the way you believe is fair).

When earnings fluctuate, what an assessor should try to do is set an assessment period and average out the earnings over that period - if they were to incorporate the weeks you were paying back the overpayment and set it off against the weeks you were being overpaid, it should come out right.

You will want chapter and verse, of course:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2...lation/29/made

Look at paragraph 29 (1) (b)

Or, in case they argue that maternity pay isn't strictly 'earnings':

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2...lation/31/made

Paragraph 31 (1) applies.

Whose fault the fact that you were overpaid is, is neither here nor there. All that matters is that their assessment reflects your income over that whole period. And currently, it seems not to.