Universal Credit Overpayment

Becles

A friend has three jobs.

Job A: part time contract but she regularly works varying amounts of overtime and claims some expenses which are paid with her salary.

Job B: Ad-hoc shifts when a local pub hosts functions. Varies between about £100-£300 a month.

Job C: self employed business selling hand made jewellery. Again earnings vary depending on sales

She was forced to migrate from tax credits to Universal Credit last October. She was told her income from jobs A and B would feed into her claim from HMRC and she needed to report the self employed earnings on the last day of each assessment period which she has done.

In August, she got a letter claiming she had been overpaid on Universal Credit and she owed a sum of money back. She queried this as she didn't understand how this happened. UC initially blamed her and claimed she wasn't entering her self employment figures properly which she disagreed with as she was. UC then claimed it was a HMRC error but wouldn't explain further.

When she checked the figures on old and new statements with her payslips, she realised the pub earnings have not been included each month. UC have suddenly added all her pub earnings between last October and August, recalculated all her statements and this is what has caused the overpayment.

She didn't realise the pub earnings were missing until this happened.

At the moment UC are blaming the employer for submitting the data late through HMRC and the pub are blaming UC as they claim they have submitted the data on time. Neither will claim responsibility for sorting it out.

On her September statement, the same thing has happened with the pub earnings missing so she'll have been overpaid this month too.

She doesn't dispute she owes the money in over payments but none of this was her fault. She's trying to get this fixed to stop it happening and causing overpayments. 

What is the best way to try and get this fixed so her payments are correct in the future?

HillStreetBlues

There are people much better than me on this situation but the best way forward currently is to keep looking at the statements and if overpaid keep that aside.
The blame game is common with this, everyone points to someone else but of course that doesn't help your friend.

sammyjammy

Clearly they are not required to report those earnings so it can't possibly be their fault, UC will only be able to apply the info when the system reports it so its clearly not their fault, it needs to be resolved between employer and HMRC.

The only responsibility your friend has in this is that surely she looked at your statement each month and how much they were to receive and realise something was amiss, particularly with the complexity of three lots of earnings?  

peteuk

Regardless of whose fault it is initially.  It’s an overpayment.  Your friend should have noticed there wages missing so therefore should have reported at the first opportunity eg the first time it happened.  

They can ask of the repayment be taken over a period of months…

Becles

Saw her again today.

She didn't notice the wages were wrong on the statement. 

Her Job A payslip shows:
gross pay
- tax/NI
+ expenses
total paid into bank account

The pub job is lax with handing out the payslips so sometimes it's a couple of weeks after she's been paid before she gets the actual payslip.

She now knows she has to calculate the net pay from Job A herself and add it to net pay from pub to check it's correct.