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Correction of UC journal records
Any update from DWP Stakeholders on this Daphne ? (btw, thanks for the other updates on other threads ... )
Disucssed in our team meeting this morning - The ‘Payments’ screen on the online Journal which is where the ‘calculation’ of UC is shown and is effectively the best approximation of an ‘award notice’ is still getting amended during the course of the month, and also gets amended retrospectively for previous months. But the new details are overwritten, so there is no record for the customer of what was previously displayed on the account, it is as if it was never calculated any differently, and there are not dates to enable tracing of when changes, amendments (decisions? determinations?) have been input at DWP end or in response to what new information. SOmetimes the amounts shown on the payments screen simply do not match what has been paid to the customer.
Fundamental design issue.
Also no way of saving screens for own records other than to take a ‘screen shot’ or ‘snip’.
I haven’t Sarah - but thanks for the reminder - I’ve just sent a chasing email…
Also no way of saving screens for own records other than to take a ‘screen shot’ or ‘snip’.
Personally,whenever I have cause to go on a claimant’s journal, I print the whole thing out so I have something to cross reference against later when the whole thing has been changed. I don’t know if you’ve reached that stage yet.
Here is the reply via stakeholders -
It is correct that where a statement is revised (because of an over or under payment for example) the UC system updates the original statement and it’s not possible for the claimant to have a view over time of how their entitlement for that period has changed. The statement represents a claimant’s entitlement for a given assessment period; if a claimant has any queries concerning the amounts within an award (or awards) they can contact their work coach or case manager who can discuss their award history/alterations with them.
We are aware that this is an issue and do have, on our current plans, a feature that will look at statement enhancements; all future features receive regular prioritisation review and at this time we cannot confirm the timescale and delivery for statement enhancements.
So it looks like it’s a good idea to print or take screen shots - but of course lots of claimants won’t realise that or necessarily have the resources to do it! And no indication of when things will improve despite the fact that we’re not approaching accelerated roll-out!
despite the fact that we’re not approaching accelerated roll-out!
Of course, you meant to say “now” ... or did you? Maybe you meant to say “not”! I am not betting on anything until after the late summer “firebreak”
despite the fact that we’re not approaching accelerated roll-out!
Of course, you meant to say “now” ... or did you? Maybe you meant to say “not”! I am not betting on anything until after the late summer “firebreak”
July (with 30 JCP starts) was meant to be a transition from ~5 JCP per month previously to ~50 JCP starts per month from October 2017.
It looks like all 30 JCP will start digital in July as planned but I think eight of those only start for some of their postcodes - they’re catching up during the September ‘firebreak’.
despite the fact that we’re not approaching accelerated roll-out!
Of course, you meant to say “now” ... or did you? Maybe you meant to say “not”! I am not betting on anything until after the late summer “firebreak”
Sorry!! Didn’t read it through properly! Yes I meant now! Although some postcodes are delayed to September as Jon says, it’s still a big increase on numbers going full service.
FOI request which confirms that if award is revised the original statement is not saved on the claimant’s journal -
Claimants can access their account on-line and view all their statements for each assessment period (which includes each component, deductions and adjustments where appropriate).
When we revise an award following verification of housing costs or savings, we issue a new statement which replaces the original one. The previous statements are not saved on the claimant’s journal.
If a claimant wants to see additional personal information we hold on UC IT systems, they can request this through a Subject Access Request.
Glenys has requested some further information…
This seems to include a more general issue - when I asked for copies of decisions etc when challenging an overpayment I was told that we would have to make a subject access request. When I eventually got the decisions as part of an appeal, they included the information that the original decision had been “made void” and the process started again, later. Interesting.
In the short term we should perhaps consider asking for copies of the server logs in order to identify the chain of decisions and - can I commend CIS 3228 2003 to people who like a good read (Judge Bano on why “constructing a narrative” isn’t good enough).
In the longer term perhaps we need to talk to someone who knows about computers and benefit processing - in the context of contemporaneous evidence from the server log, or whatever bit of the feersum endjinns keeps that sort of thing. I’m thinking here that someone from HMRC (tax bit) might be helpful. I may be wrong but I think HMRC staff looking at companies may ask to see computer records to check what was done, and evidence of what was the case when. It will also be clear by now hat I haven’t a clue how these things work…
Does anyone know Gareth from (I think) Ferret? Or some of the techies on Lisson Grove and Advice Pro? Sounds like a good start.
Raising this one again as it doesn’t seem to be any different over 2 years later. Statements are changed to show an additional element back to when they have decided it’s payable from. Daphne are there any further updates?
I haven’t any updates in respect of this Rosie - but it’s certainly something I can raise yet again…
Thanks Daphne - if you wouldn’t mind.. It means our Deputyship team are faced with screenshotting or printing every Statement or decision notice and then scanning them into their paperless system.. Not a massive issue at the moment with only a handful of clients on UC but this will increase and it’s still taking time which could be better used.
I haven’t any updates in respect of this Rosie - but it’s certainly something I can raise yet again…
It certainly hasn’t gone away.
We have two clients appeals awaiting a date for directions hearings where the original payment notices and other information (s/e earnings & expenses, childcare costs etc) have been ‘overwritten’ or disappeared from the account due to the revision of an earlier decision on the claim.
In the s/e case DWP have accepted repeated IT issues with the earnings declaration process on the clients UC account which has generate both under and overpayment However they don’t appear to have any effective way to correct it and therefore generate the correct UC payment for each historic AP.
The other the case concerns the correct calculation an underpayment due to a successful R2R appeal which re-set the AP dates applied to a second successful claim to the date of claim for the original claim and as a result the treatment of earnings previously reported via RTI and of childcare costs has completely changed / disappeared.
DWP have failed to provide submissions that address any of these underlying issues. We have used SAR to obtain all UC records. It is clear to us that due to the way many of the determinations within UC are automated DWP are consistently failing to disclose a lot of relevant info. in appeal subs.
It is also clear that DWP front line staff / appeal writers do not understand how much of this IT works when there are complex historic issues and the IT system overwrites earlier information / decisions / payment notices to correct one issue / decision but then generates a whole lot of new issues / decisions - for every action there is an equal and (unintended) opposite reaction!
It may well be that the softwear build simply did not anticipate the consequences of having to implement a revision decision and the problems then generated!
I haven’t any updates in respect of this Rosie - but it’s certainly something I can raise yet again…
It certainly hasn’t gone away.
We have two clients appeals awaiting a date for directions hearings where the original payment notices and other information (s/e earnings & expenses, childcare costs etc) have been ‘overwritten’ or disappeared from the account due to the revision of an earlier decision on the claim.
In the s/e case DWP have accepted repeated IT issues with the earnings declaration process on the clients UC account which has generate both under and overpayment However they don’t appear to have any effective way to correct it and therefore generate the correct UC payment for each historic AP.
The other the case concerns the correct calculation an underpayment due to a successful R2R appeal which re-set the AP dates applied to a second successful claim to the date of claim for the original claim and as a result the treatment of earnings previously reported via RTI and of childcare costs has completely changed / disappeared.
DWP have failed to provide submissions that address any of these underlying issues. We have used SAR to obtain all UC records. It is clear to us that due to the way many of the determinations within UC are automated DWP are consistently failing to disclose a lot of relevant info. in appeal subs.
It is also clear that DWP front line staff / appeal writers do not understand how much of this IT works when there are complex historic issues and the IT system overwrites earlier information / decisions / payment notices to correct one issue / decision but then generates a whole lot of new issues / decisions - for every action there is an equal and (unintended) opposite reaction!
It may well be that the softwear build simply did not anticipate the consequences of having to implement a revision decision and the problems then generated!
The above pretty much sums it up!
We have a particular case akin presumably to the official error scenario Chris Grayling envisaged during the passage of the Act at the bill stage in 2011.
This client’s UC records are so heavily redacted in places, satirists would have a field day.
Whether this case is a one off or will become a pattern of heavily redacted papers obtained by SAR?
Vaguely related: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2021-01-08/134451
Again not directly related but see update at https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/15024/ re one of the cases I refer to above. In both case DWP eventually conceded that the underlying issue was a problem with the UC build.
It remains a concern (especially at the appeal stage) that UC are unable / unwilling to explain / provide a copy of information, such as a payment statement, that has been ‘overwritten’ following a change to an original decision etc.
The written answer refers only to Journal entries which IMHO really shouldn’t be altered in any circumstance (but the information corrected with an accompanying explanation /entry).
However, the process of ‘overwriting’ other areas of the UC account such as payment statements is clearly an automated process. Equally clearly DWP can access the original version(s) but the claimant can only see the latest version.
In the other case I refer to above some of the claimant’s payments statements were ‘overwritten’ on more than one occasion due to several revisions of the original entitlement as DWP attempted to correct errors made by another part of the UC build. Only a SAR elicited all of the required information which enabled us to see exactly what had occurred and what the causes of the overpayments were - ‘official error’ due to problems with the IT build in respect of reporting self-employed earnings.
I also think part of the problem is that the UC IT system is so complex and produces so many ‘screens’ for a straight forward transaction on the account that staff do not understand how it works or where to find relevant information. I say this on the basis of the sheer volume of paperwork that a SAR provides (compared to the volume of paperwork a SAR would produce for a legacy benefit for a similar transaction).
Computer says “No - I’m not going to tell you what I’m doing, why or how”.
Written answer says that while claimants should receive an explanation to explain any changes to their journal messages -
There are exceptions to providing explanation of amendments which can apply if it would be inappropriate to do so due to a claimant’s personal circumstances.
I find it difficult to envisage a situation where they cannot say an entry has been removed even if they can’t give details of what that entry said…
I think I’ll send an enquiry up via stakeholder forum…
Hi, i have been wanting to post about this for some time but have been waiting for a resolution from the DWP complaints department which we finally received a fortnight ago, after waiting months.
Essentially, this case concerned a vulnerable claimant who is currently not fit for work due to severe mental health difficulties. She claimed UC late Nov ‘19 & had 5 subsequent erroneous awards (For 5 consecutive months, i.e. Dec ‘19 - June / July ‘20) where UC kept calculating a non-existent JSA payment as a deduction from her UC award. We would lodge an MR each time, and they would manually override the issue & refund her. I instigated a complaint about this at the time and was advised it is something to do with their systems, which in the end they managed to resolve.
Nov 2020 the client receives a UC overpayment letter for approx £1300. There are so many flawed aspects of their processes that followed this. First we lodge an MR & they produce incorrect award notices for the 5 month period covering the alleged overpayment. It transpired that these award notices were pulled from the system that had amended the original award notices, essentially they had been ‘re-written’ in my view, with no explanation as to why, nor were the original ones produced, because they didn’t have them. My client was able to produce the originals as (luckily) she had saved them from her journal the previous year (she is savvy and foresaw this mess).
The MR was revised and reduced down the o/p. But there was still an o/p of £700 which my client simply hadn’t had, so we challenged this again. The DWP’s attitude was that we should be grateful for this, and indeed tried to pressure my client into accepting the revised o/p & withdrawing the appeal, but when we requested a breakdown of how the o/p had arisen, they (apparently) investigated deeper and came up with even more erroneous awards - this time they revised the o/p to £2400!!!! The appeal response included multiple award letters, all totally incorrect, which had been amended & effectively ‘overridden’ the original award letters.
Fast forward a couple of months involving us producing the originals and pursuing a complaint to force them to look at the original award letters involving the erroneous JSA payments from early 2020, which they were not able to obtain from their own systems, and it was only by chance that we had the same complaints officer for the complaint in 2020 and this complaint, who was able to advise the DWP case manager of the JSA / UC errors, because he remembered the case, were we able to ‘win’ this case. Even during the final review telephone call i had with the case manager to go through their documents and cross ref them with mine (ours) they were still making up figures of this o/p. They maintained throughout that the records were there in the ‘back system’ if they needed to access them.
Upon final resolution it turned out that not only was she not overpaid UC, she had been UNDERPAID nearly £500. The stress this process placed upon her, and the exacerbation of her anxiety, was significant and I strongly believe that this was primarily as a result of their misconduct in ‘amending’ or ‘overriding’ of original awards, not holding the original records, and failing to admit that they do not keep originals of this correspondence. It is maladministration at best, which the complaint confirmed and awarded her the maximum compensation for. I do not know of any other government department that would be allowed to operate with impunity in this way.
That is shocking! We’ve got our monthly stakeholder meeting this morning - I will certainly raise then - but will also think whether something further might be in order.
It is certainly an issue where there is no visible audit trail of the UC AP payments due to the overwriting of the original AP payment when there has been a change of circs which DWP then state has caused an overpayment. I currently have a client at the moment with an o/p because of reinstatement of CA after the son won his PIP appeal and DWP are adamant that client received the carer’s element payment during the overpayment period because that is what the payment screen shows! So not only is she having to repay, correctly, the CA paid which hadn’t been deducted but hasn’t been paid the carer element for the same period! Client is providing bank statements to show payments received but it gets complicated as there were also housing costs initially paid to client then direct to landlord. The DWP do not make it easy for themselves but even less easy for clients to understand.
Asking for a subject access request has been known to concentrate the minds of organisations usefully.
Off the back of what Gareth says, surely such flagrant misuse of client UC journals in such a routine fashion would fall foul of GDPR requirements? I don’t know enough about how this might be challenged but if you think about your bank account, as an obvious analogy, you’d never get banks being able to basically make up different versions of the truth and erase the previous entries in your accounts.
In ar-chik1’s case I suspect a SAR will reveal that the old/edited records still exist. In that case, this likely makes it an issue of staff misconduct.
This could become an issue for the ICO if we could evidence that these issues are systemic. I.e. lack of training breaches GDPR.
That being said, if DWP staff have been making unauthorised alterations to a claimants records/personal data, each individual such case might constitute a breach DWP should have reported to the ICO (regardless of whether the issue is systemic).
On the other hand, if the SAR doesn’t turn up the missing records, this most likely constitutes a breach. In my experience a complaint to the data controller at this stage sometimes results in the records magically materialising. However, that can constitute a more severe breach - lying about deleting records etc…
Any obfuscation of a data subjects access to their personal data can become a breach.
Where, as is often the case in our field, this results in (severe) detriment to our clients, the breach becomes more severe - and the bar for reporting to the ICO lower.
Unfortunately, I’ve never had any clients who were willing to pursue any such complaint against the DWP. If anyone has any cases they think could make for an effective complaint I’d be keen to hear about it, or if anyone just wants a chat about it can send me a PM.
Unfortunately, I’ve never had any clients who were willing to pursue any such complaint against the DWP. If anyone has any cases they think could make for an effective complaint I’d be keen to hear about it, or if anyone just wants a chat about it can send me a PM.
And this is the nub of the problem.
We are all aware that payment statements are amended (as a result of successful review or MR etc) and there is no “archive section”- they just disappear. We all know various information is amended without history of the amendments being available. We know that UC agents upload and take down info at will.
Most clients are not savvy to make pdf copies.
But over last 2 years I’ve only managed to persuade 2 (TWO!) clients to submit SARs. And when I received the bundles, they made no sense what.so.ever. Absolute nonsense. I thought I would go crazy trying to understand the information. Chaotic and not chronological, full of jargon. Useless.
Funny thing is- useful change would not require a huge revolution. All we’d need is a section called Archives. Simples.
You don’t strictly speaking need to convince clients to submit SARs themselves, we can do that as reps.
As for the complexity of the response you could ask DWP for a digital copy, though I’m not sure they would comply. More usefully, a SAR doesn’t have to be for the whole, unredacted mess of info, you can be as specific as you need. For example: any journal notes from 01/01-01/07, including deleted/edited ones.
The issues normally arise when the SAR response is inaccurate or inadequate, and you have to complain.
That is shocking! We’ve got our monthly stakeholder meeting this morning - I will certainly raise then - but will also think whether something further might be in order.
Thanks very much, Daphne. Much appreciated.
In ar-chik1’s case I suspect a SAR will reveal that the old/edited records still exist. In that case, this likely makes it an issue of staff misconduct.
This could become an issue for the ICO if we could evidence that these issues are systemic. I.e. lack of training breaches GDPR.
That being said, if DWP staff have been making unauthorised alterations to a claimants records/personal data, each individual such case might constitute a breach DWP should have reported to the ICO (regardless of whether the issue is systemic).
On the other hand, if the SAR doesn’t turn up the missing records, this most likely constitutes a breach. In my experience a complaint to the data controller at this stage sometimes results in the records magically materialising. However, that can constitute a more severe breach - lying about deleting records etc…Any obfuscation of a data subjects access to their personal data can become a breach.
Where, as is often the case in our field, this results in (severe) detriment to our clients, the breach becomes more severe - and the bar for reporting to the ICO lower.Unfortunately, I’ve never had any clients who were willing to pursue any such complaint against the DWP. If anyone has any cases they think could make for an effective complaint I’d be keen to hear about it, or if anyone just wants a chat about it can send me a PM.
Indeed, completely agree. This complaint itself, coupled with the complaint last year because of the DWP’s system error deducting the JSA that never existed, quite frankly nearly pushed her over the edge.
I think one of the most significant issues in this for her (and to some degree for me) was that during one of their many erroneous revisions (think it was revised 4 times in total before we reached a conclusion), the wording they used was so derogatory. They wrote & quoted that they had advised her that she should not receive two benefits at the same time (referring to the JSA & UC because they’d re-decided that she had been paid the JSA at this point) & that “any claimant who receives money they are not entitled to should expect to re-pay it, and the rep would be wise to advise her client of this & not encourage double claiming” or something to that degree.
It was procedurally, systemically flawed from start to finish. And it was also the hostile attitude towards benefit claimants that we know exists, exposed in all its glory. The suspicion and accusations to someone who it turns out was the victim of the department’s misconduct and being underpaid really does paint a grim picture of this hostile, punitive, and deeply broken system.
From our (limited experience) a SAR will not gather the original payment statements etc that are ‘overwritten’ when a decision is revised or superseded. Although it should provide original decisions (assuming they were ever notified to the claimant!).
In cases we have dealt with, like those above involving overpayments (or underpayments), we were fortunate to have become involved at an early stage and claimant/we had taken copies on the original payment statements etc before they were subsequently ‘overwritten’ and could, therefore, evidence the ‘errors’ in subsequent decisions. It was apparent the CMs/ DMs/ appeal writers did not have access to that original information.
In our view because the payment history in a claimants UC account is ‘overwritten’ by any subsequent decision(s) (i.e it can happen more than once) affecting an AP it is virtually impossible to ‘track back’ to get an accurate picture of the claim / payment history.
This ‘overwriting’ appears to be a fundemental flaw in the UC IT architecture to the detriment of claimants possibly to £K’s.
Just to add to all of the above one of the other features of received paperwork in SAR’s with UC is the extent and volume of redactions.
Hi, I’ve just spoken with a client who has had nearly a year of UC payments overwritten with payments now showing the TP when it wasn’t paid. In addition she was notified that she had been underpaid yet when she called Debt Management, they told her that there was an overpayment of £4000 so she wasn’t due any of the underpayment. The client has not received any notification of this overpayment and UC are failing to provide an explanation.
I have emailed the Partnership Manager but they have just said that Debt Management will be writing to the client!
What can we do? This is causing her mental health to worsen which impacts on her phsycial health conditions too.
Thanks