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Overpayment shennanigans; a new low?
I have a case where there has been an overpayment of around £6k; it hung around for a while; largely I thought because it’s quite complex and we don’t see too many 01 appeals at the moment, during the delay I received an unexpected direction to list the appeal.
It turns out when I’d submitted the SSCS1 they’d recalculated; knocked £22 off a £6k overpayment and tried to lapse the appeal.
I call that playing dirty!
/rant
Are they not entitled to lapse it?
We picked up a similar case a while ago, ESA had knocked a few weeks off a £15K overpayment once the appeal had gone in. They then did lapse the appeal, but instead of issuing a new decision, they passed the revised balance straight to debt management for recovery. Intervention of MP, and a request from the Independent Case Examiner asking them to issue a new appealable decision, were all ignored.
We finally got the complaint in front of someone at Debt Management who understood the problem. We never did get a new decision, but they wrote it off and reimbursed the client what had been recovered to date.
Are they not entitled to lapse it?
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Yes they are but on principle it shouldn’t happen. Gladly a DTJ took the same stance.