Overpayment and notice to repay

devildog

Most of us are aware that if an overpayment is made our attention is drawn to the Student Finance Declaration form that you have to sign before they will release any money to you and that the declaration states that if an overpayment occurs you are obligated to repay this in full BUT in the same vein-as in the notice to repay states " Under the regulations......." if Student Finance overpaid due to them NOT following their procedures as stated in The Education (Student Support) regulations what then?

Taiko

12/13 Overpayments Guidance:

Overpayments made as the result of an internal error
87. The Regulations do not specifically cover circumstances where a
miscalculation by SFE results in a student receiving payment of a higher
amount than he or she is entitled to. However, regulation 119(1) provides
that an eligible student must, if required by the Secretary of State, repay any
amount paid to him under Part 5 or Part 6 of the Regulations which for
whatever reason exceeds the amount of support to which he is entitled
under Part 5 or Part 6. And regulation 117(2) provides that the Secretary of
State must recover an overpayment of any grant for living and other costs
unless he considers it is not appropriate to do so.
88. SFE should always carry out the re-assessment even when the
overpayment has resulted from an internal error. The circumstance that
caused the overpayment to arise should be taken into consideration when
negotiating the most appropriate method of recovery where the student is
unable to make repayment in full. SLC will negotiate the recovery of the
overpaid amount on a case by case basis and in line with BIS guidelines.

devildog

But what if the student was not eligible(operative word here )? What if the Uni didn't confirm attendance? Regs state that before payment by Student Finance the uni must confirm attendance. Why didn't they correctly revise the award on withdraw and why then reassess to full entitlement in August? Had they followed procedure overpayments would not have been made. It isn't a 'simple' miscalculation
What I am trying to get at is how can they say that a student must abide by the regs and repay when they themselves are not following the regulations as set out.
Just for clarity-the overpayment has not been spent, it is available to be repaid.

Taiko

Drop me a PM with full details of what's gone on. Will have a nose.

devildog

Will do. It's not that we believe that this money shouldn't be repaid, clearly there was no entitlement. Our 'beef' is that they do not follow their own regs and 'screw up' finance for many students year on year, students either don't notice, or if they do, they believe it is correct and then find themselves in dire consequences.

Taiko, just spent an age detailing everything for you, pushed send and it has disappeared(not shown up as being sent) so assume you haven't received. Will have another go later.

nimbo

with repayments are they allowed to just be added to 'normal' repayments if it's their fault????

devildog

nimbo wrote: »

with repayments are they allowed to just be added to 'normal' repayments if it's their fault????

Don't know. I think the 'norm' is to deduct any amount owing from any future funding eg if funding was requested for another year they would assess what entitled to and then deduct what you owe from previous years. If no future fuding is requested they expect you to repay in full or if you are unable to do this to arrange a payment plan with them paying off a certain amount every month.

Taiko

It's completely at their discretion how they are repaid.

I was always in the belief that, if the error had been made by my staff, we'd defer it until the end of the studies. It meant more work for us to manually assess all the time, but it was the fair way to deal with it.

If it was the student's fault, I'd also usually be lenient. Unless of course the student got the backs up of the assessing team, in which case we stuck purely to the letter of the regulations and recovered the overpayment straight away.