UC over payment

elle_may

Checking sons uc payment in his bank account found it had trebled. Could not think why but looked on his uc account they had not taken his full ESA off the total uc payment. Emailed for explanation and they said it had been a tecnical problem. on their side. They issued a new statement and will let me know on next months statement how he would pay it back. If i had not checked he could have spent the money, and not known. So people should check just incase it has happened to others. It does not impact him as it might others that are near the breadline.

Robbie64

I had the same happen to me, with only part of the ESA payment deducted. It's a technical problem caused by the change in benefit rates in April. The same has happened to some people claiming Carers Allowance.

I also informed them, when i fisrt noticed the problem on my statement. A new statement was issued with the correct deduction but seemingly not in enough time to stop me being overpaid. I've put the money to once side until I've been contacted by Debt Management.

Muttleythefrog

I had same issue this year across the April rates change. I have not reported it as they had also miscalculated the previous 12 months of UC and there is a limit to how much of my precious time and energy I'm prepared to commit to doing other people's jobs and banging my head against the wall… my last efforts spelt out what my UC housing element should be and they still deliberately altered records to overpay me.

Robbie64

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81997589#Comment_81997589

Do you leave messages on the Journal and if so, do you ever get them answered?

Muttleythefrog

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81997605#Comment_81997605

Oh yes....local Jobcentre staff usually pretty quick to respond to any messages or requests and screw things up..lol.

huckster

Technical problem caused by April benefit rate change or April 5th being end of tax year. Because some benefits count as income for the tax year, there is a blip in the system. UC picks up that ESA for example is showing as having end date of 5th April, but there is no benefit record yet showing for 6th April onwards.

DWP need to improve their systems, to eliminate these blips as they must be causing hundreds of millions in overpayments and all of the associated extra admin, phone calls etc, must come at a huge cost.

TimeLord1

I think a lot of this is down to classifying people on contribution-related ESA only, then suddenly becoming new-style claims without doing the income-related process.