Has anyone ever challenged recovery from the estate of a deceased claimant ?
My client is dealing with the estate of his deceased mother. She claimed IS with just under 4000 in the back, which was not declared so the tariff income was not deducted. By the time of her death she had over 15000 in the bank.
The client has received a request for 8000 + from the estate, which all looks to have been correctly calculated with diminishing capital etc.
I assume it would not be recoverable if there was an administrative error, she he could be looking to check the forms etc. to see if it was declared. But it seems likely she did not declare.
Is there any other way to challenge ? It just seems harsh to consider the whole amount to be an overpayment, when all but the original 4000 must have been saved out of her IS. And she must have put herself in hardship to leave money to her family.
Also how likely is it that the HB will be seeking to recover ? The overpayment calculations for IS show some weeks in which she was not entitled at all, and therefore HB should not have paid.
It doesn't look like you can ask them to show discretion and not recover, as it is hard to argue an estate will experience hardship etc.

I currently have a similar case. The DWP are attempting to recover £18,000 from an estate of a woman who had severe disabilities. I saw on the I/S forms that an 'x' was in place where the deceased had signed. This indicated someone assiting with form filling. I further found that some forms had the name of a person filling the form in for the client. We obtained a copy of the full medical records and await the social services files. This will tell us the degree of help the person needed in day to day affairs like form filling. Hopefully this will then indicate that advice was sought (in the form of the person helping complete the applications) and discharge liability from my client.

My advice is to scrutinise the application forms and see if you can determine if the deceased was able to complete forms without help.
patrick@powell-solicitors.co.uk

Thank you
but unfortunately between the tight deadline for appeals and an unwilling client (who does believe it more likely his mother made the error, and who is embarrassed about her doing so) this one is going nowhere.
Personally I think it would have been worth double checking whose mistake it was, given they can't really take more from them. But mostly I just think it is a bit sad that she went without things to save that money for her family, who now won't get any of it. And the family would buy food etc. to make sure she did take better care of herself, in effect funding the savings.
But it didn't seem a good idea to mention that to IS, who could then decide to treat the families contributions as income...
I guess you have to give up on some.