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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Housing costs  →  Thread

DWP Housing benefit investigations for self-employed claims - a new trend? 

EKS_COTTON
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Tax and Welfare Rights Officer, Equity

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Joined: 10 March 2014

Dear all,

Brent local authority are currently undertaking in house compliance activity for self-employed HB claims, and apparently using the DWP to do some of this compliance work for them.  Has anyone seen anything like this before?

For example - My self-employed client received a letter from Brent local authority telling her she was to be investigated which was then retracted as an error by the HB decision maker.  She has a direct email contact with this decision maker who seems to be very competent.  They have good direct communication.  the cleint reports changes to her regularly as soon as they happen, and the decision maker then updates her HB award each time she reports a change. 

However the client then received a letter from DWP compliance which has invited the client in general to a compliance meeting, even though she does not claim any DWP benefits, nor did in the past.  They are asking her for all her financial information.  See copy of letter attached (only 2 pages out of the 11 were sent)

Although I haven’t spoken to the DWP compliance officer directly (the phone continues to ring off) I have been advised by the HB decision maker that the DWP are investigating her HB claim. 

Is anyone else seeing things like this happen?  Is it linked to cost cutting and/or the implementation of UC?

It is difficult to advise people on their rights when they have no idea what they are being investigated for and told to provide lots of sensitive information without knowing why.  I know that regulations provide for benefit authorities to request information to check entitlement but this approach seems a bit excessive in my view.

I wonder whether anyone has any advice on how deal with these DWP compliance investigations also? The client has managed to postpone the appointment and doesn’t have a new date yet and I need to figure out what if anything can be done in the meantime.

Many thanks,

EKS

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Jon (CANY)
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Welfare benefits - Craven CAB, North Yorkshire

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https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/single-fraud-investigation-service

edit: so it’s largely all done centrally now. Though I think it gets a bit muddied when some interviews are still carried out in local authority premises, and/or may be done by the same staff as before, who have been TUPEd over from the LA to DWP.

[ Edited: 22 Nov 2017 at 04:48 pm by Jon (CANY) ]
BC Welfare Rights
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The Brunswick Centre, Kirklees & Calderdale

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EKS_COTTON - 22 November 2017 11:53 AM

For example - My self-employed client received a letter from Brent local authority telling her she was to be investigated which was then retracted as an error by the HB decision maker.  She has a direct email contact with this decision maker who seems to be very competent.  They have good direct communication.  the cleint reports changes to her regularly as soon as they happen, and the decision maker then updates her HB award each time she reports a change.

How usual is it for an individual claimant to have direct access to the HB person processing her claim? I am aware of someone in similar contact with a HB processor (old friends) and always wondered why this obvious conflict of interest was not detected/stopped. Any possibility that it is the HB worker who is being investigated in some way and your client is just caught up in the audit trail?
edit
I suppose email contact probably not that unusual, makes sense. Mine more face to face.

[ Edited: 22 Nov 2017 at 08:26 pm by BC Welfare Rights ]
HB Anorak
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Benefits consultant/trainer - hbanorak.co.uk, East London

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It used to that way in the old days of paper files - assessors tended to have a split of cases that they looked after (surname alphabetical or street alphabetical normally) so you would always have the same assessor dealing with your case and interviewing you if need be.  It’s less common these days: EDM systems don’t work like that - routine work items get distributed according to all sorts of routing priorities, you only get the same assessor twice if there is an ongoing issue that someone is sorting out.

There would obviously be a risk of a conflict of interest if the assessor and the claimant were acquainted outside work: you might be tempted to pretend you didn’t hear something, even the appearance of a conflict would expose the assessor to a risk of being accused of colluding in fraud.

It is highly unlikely that anything like that has happened in the OP’s case.  It sounds like a routine referral for investigation of the claimant.  Councils can no longer prosecute HB offences and their fraud functions have largely transferred across to DWP SFIS.  Only exception is where the fraud spans multiple service areas, in which case the corporate anti-fraud people might touch on HB issues.  But if the Council thinks there is a suspicion of pure HB fraud it will refer to SFIS, and if the case passes SFIS’s triage it will get investigated in the name of the DWP.  Obviously impossible to guess what the specific concern might be in OP’s case, but my rough estimate would be that 9/10 fraud referrals involve undisclosed partners or capital - make of that what you will.