Recovery of overpaid state pension after death

gorillagirl

Please can anyone help?

DWP are asking for bank details from 6/10/2003 to see if deceased mum was overpaid pension credit. Presumably, this was when she was first assessed. I have no record of what her financial situation was on that day or what information was given. I have bank statements from 2008 for a newly opened account and 2010 for her current account. I have no doubt that the bank are not going to have kept details from 2003. The letter from DWP is confusing as it implies they will base evidence on the information I can supply - which will not be the same as 2003, when she was assessed. Mum had AIP (for which there is paperwork but not as far back as bank statements) and was 99 when she died in September. I understand this has arisen because the figures from Probate don't match those of 2003.  Mum had squirrelled away savings by not spending her attendence allowance, this was recently starting to be used to pay for carers but then she passed away. Her home has an endowment of £54000, which will be paid back on selling, and is accruing interest.

Please, any insight as to what to say to DWP would be very welcome. If it turns out that DWP claim the pension credit back it will be thousands.

Pollycat

gorillagirl
I would start your own thread about the DWP issue regarding your Mum's potential pension credit overpayment.

I started this thread and it is about a different issue - i.e. overpayment of state pension.

There is discussion in the thread about whether DWP have powers to recover overpaid state pension and whether they have powers to recover overpayments of means-tested benefits.

You may be interested in this post on page 2 of this thread:

p00hsticks said:

As I read it, the Paul Lewis article differentiates between two distinct (but possibly overlapping) scenarios - Overpayment of State Pension as a result of a payment being made after the person has died, and overpayment of mean-tested benefits such as Pension Credit, where circumstances come to light after the persons desth that indicate that the person may have been mis-reporting their circumstances whilst alive and therefore was either being awarded too much or should not have been entitled at all.

DWP have no right to reclaim the former, but can and will investigate the latter and are within their rights to ask for any money to be repaid (anecdotely, often such an investigation is triggered by DWP seeing an unexpectedly high probate value ,which is due to the value of the deceaseds residence being included, and would not have precluded them from rightfully claiming Pension Credit).

It seems to describe my situation and yours - which are different.

Good luck.

Just to let people know - we did receive a letter from DWP regarding overpayment of pension (2 weeks) and have sat on that letter for the time being.
I was not happy about the time it took to get hold of the death certificate and the unique reference for the 'tell us once' service.
With hindsight I would have rung DWP the day after Mum died.
Interestingly, the letter mentioned that notification of death now comes electronically to DWP as soon as the death is registered.