DWP Overpayment request/Liability

Flugelhorn

re the pension credit figure of "£166 / week - that is the total including state pension so pension credit would have been much smaller and if she only had £5K in the bank then she would have been entitled to that amount of weekly pension

PS this is from govt document:

Where there are insufficient funds in the estate to meet all
the debts
7.19 There is a priority order to follow when the Personal Representative
establishes that the estate does not contain sufficient funds to pay all creditors in full,
after paying funeral and estate expenses.
Benefit overpayment recovery guide
53
7.20 If there are insufficient funds to pay all the creditors in one group in full, they
are expected to pay them on a pro-rata basis. Where this is correctly applied to the Department’s claim, the part payment is accepted in settlement of that claim.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/770083/benefit-overpayment-recovery-guide.pdf

debts can only be taken from the estate of the deceased, not your poor dad

Mojisola

MICKIE wrote: »

She had £5k in cash but an insurance policy and funeral plan took the value to £12k

The value of the funeral plan would not have been counted as savings.

Manxman_in_exile

MICKIE wrote: »

I know, but when we called the Debt Recovery Team at DWP they told me this is true.

I can't believe it.

If I were you, I'd call them again, explain what question you previously asked, and tell them what you were told the answer was. If you explain as you have here, I'd expect them to backtrack hastily. If they give you the same answer as before, ask to speak to a supervisor or manager.

Mojisola

MICKIE wrote: »

However, they have informed him that as the executor of the estate he is personally liable if the overpayment is more than the value of assets.

Executors can become financially liable if they distribute the money from the estate before all the debts are paid. If the beneficiaries won't return the money, the executors would have to pay.

There are no circumstances where an executor would be personally liable if the debts exceeded the estate.

Shelldean

She possibly had protected savings.
This means she didn't have to declare any increase in savings as you usually do when receiving benefit.

This means she had a different amount is savings at probate, to what she had when she applied. And they want to know wht?

We did OH Nan probate and had exactly the same.
They wanted statements from 6 yrs and 10 yrs ago.
We could only provide the six yrs statements as that all the bank still held.

Took an age to get it sorted. Not because of difficulties but because the wheels of SAP turn slowly!!

SevenOfNine

As with many of the others here, we had a similar letter from DWP when my aunt died. It's really more of a warning not to distribute the estate until they have investigated, otherwise it is as Mojisola says in #15.

DWP requested a bank statement from a specific date 7 years earlier. It was the date she completed a claim form for a benefit, & subsequently started receiving it based on the financial statement she'd made back then.

The same letter also stated that financial organisations ordinarily kept records for up to 6 years. In which case it seemed somewhat daft to have asked me to go back 7 years!

I wrote to Barclays where she had her account & just said I wanted a copy of the oldest statement they could give me, she'd banked with them for donkey's years.

They misread my letter & I received copies of literally hundreds of pages from their financial logs going back 6 years - still, no fee requested so they'd wasted their own time & money.

I sent DWP one page, the first one from 6 years ago, which presumably was far enough back to show them that she had not made a fraudulent claim. In due course they wrote to say "nothing owed" & I distributed the estate.

If memory serves me well (which it doesn't usually), it did take them 3 or 4 months. Just send them what they've asked for as quickly as possible to get it moving forward, sell the house but dad shouldn't start distributing to beneficiaries (& if dad is the main one, he shouldn't start spending, yet).

MICKIE

Manxman_in_exile wrote: »

If I were you, I'd call them again, explain what question you previously asked, and tell them what you were told the answer was. If you explain as you have here, I'd expect them to backtrack hastily. If they give you the same answer as before, ask to speak to a supervisor or manager.

Thank you, i took your advice and called them back. The person I spoke to was very happy to set the record straight in saying that they only try to recover money from the executor if they have distributed the estates money.
Thankfully this hasn't been done yet and won't be until we get a final letter from Recovery of Estates. They did advise that this may take several months, but at least my Father has peace of mind that he will not be personally liable.

Thanks everyone.

Manxman_in_exile

MICKIE wrote: »

Thank you, i took your advice and called them back. The person I spoke to was very happy to set the record straight in saying that they only try to recover money from the executor if they have distributed the estates money.
Thankfully this hasn't been done yet and won't be until we get a final letter from Recovery of Estates. They did advise that this may take several months, but at least my Father has peace of mind that he will not be personally liable.

Thanks everyone.

Good - hope that reassures your dad. As above, make sure he doesn't distribute it yet, or go on a spending spree!

Mojisola

It's quite likely that your grandma had an AIP, possibly an indefinite AIP.

Check any paperwork or just phone up and ask the DWP to check their records.

https://www.entitledto.co.uk/help/assessed-income-period

badmemory

Unfortunately the DWP seem to have access to the probate figure but not to the sources of that figure. This problem seems to crop up a lot & I can only remember one that was NOT related to ownership of a property.