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Overpayment Recovery Of State Pension & PIP

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  • Missionhall
    Missionhall Posts: 9 Forumite
    Eighth Anniversary Combo Breaker First Post
    The joint account did become a sole account in my name , correct.  So was not part of the estate. It all gets a bit confusing and at not the best of times . Thanks for your help, still looking for the earlier letters . 
  • Keep_pedalling
    Keep_pedalling Posts: 20,822 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    edited 26 July at 7:04PM
    NedS said:
    Yes you are in the correct place. Sorry for the questions but a bit more info required

    Were you the executor of your wife’s estate? Are you the residual beneficiary? Were these overpayments paid into a sole account or a joint one?

    Technically these payments were not part of her estate so should not have been distributed. Creditors have 6 years to claim from an estate, and the DWP grinds very slowly. 
    and
    It would have been a joint account at that time . Haven't found other paperwork yet . 
    @Keep_pedalling as you asked the question, does this mean the overpayments immediately passed to the surviving joint account holder and did not form part of the deceased estate, so are gone and unrecoverable?
    If DWP have written to the OP as executor of the estate, presumably the OP can simply respond in their role of executor advising DWP that the payments were made to a joint account and therefore were never part of the estate, so there is nothing for the estate to repay?

    That might be possible if the OP was not both the executor and the owner of the account the payment went into. 

    This is less likely to happen where payments were going into a sole account which would be frozen once the bank were aware of the death of the account holder. 
  • Spendless
    Spendless Posts: 24,663 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Pollycat said:
    Not sure if that applies to PIP overpayments as well.
    Spendless said:
    Not sure if that applies to PIP overpayments as well.
    I suspect it doesnt. Nan wasnt in receipt of anything other than pensions when she died. 
    That's why I specifically referred to 'state pension'.
    Pollycat said:
     :smile:  
    Yes, Im aware you did. 🙂. 
    The DWP attempt an ambiguous reply about it, but I told Mum to stick to her guns and it wasnt repaid.

    Not that it was a discussion here but I saw it elsewhere on the board very much along the lines of 'I wouldnt dream of not paying it back'
    Here's why we didn't. My Grandparents worked  full time  when my Grandad had a stroke in the mid 70s, it left him paralysed down his dominant right side, he had to give up work with immediate effect, so did Nan to care for him. He died 25 years later. In all that time he went into respite once (as Nan was deciding if she could later leave him to attend my wedding abroad - she decided she couldnt). As Grandad had a small private pension, not the full amt as hed  had to leave work at 56, this frequently meant they didnt receive any means tested help by  being only a very small amount over. Nan always came up against 'computer says no'  So in death when she was overpaid and there was no legal obligation to return the money, we thought well same rules apply, apart from this time its Nan that keeps the money - it went towards the wording on her headstone. Think she'd have liked the irony. 





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