Recovery from estates

Funny that this has been discussed so recently, but I cannae post on the recent thread. my first hit on google was me asking about the last RFE case I ran back in 2010, but I’ve got another on my desk where there was certainly undisclosed income but RFE are trying to gather the entire period back to 2007.

I know I’m lazy welfing but now I’ve finally got statements confirming the capital was held in the second AIP, and there’s no way of evidencing whether it was held in the first, other than the declaration that he had no capital.

The bank can only provide statements back to 2014 and have said so in correspondence.

Is this just a straightforward adverse inference or is there some magic I’m missing?

edit… of course they need to have notified the PR of the entitlement decision…

Dan Manville - 16 February 2022 01:14 PM

Funny that this has been discussed so recently, but I cannae post on the recent thread. my first hit on google was me asking about the last RFE case I ran back in 2010, but I’ve got another on my desk where there was certainly undisclosed income but RFE are trying to gather the entire period back to 2007.

I know I’m lazy welfing but now I’ve finally got statements confirming the capital was held in the second AIP, and there’s no way of evidencing whether it was held in the first, other than the declaration that he had no capital.

The bank can only provide statements back to 2014 and have said so in correspondence.

Is this just a straightforward adverse inference or is there some magic I’m missing?

edit… of course they need to have notified the PR of the entitlement decision…

Dan ,as you know the burden of proof will fall on the DWP and they will then have to issue a revision or supersession and overpayment decision(s). So if DWP cannot evidence the income for the whole period there can be no grounds for changing the original award or for overpayment for that period (before 2014 in your case?).

I have seen decisions where DWP determine there was an overpayment but do not seek to change the original decision or recover an overpayment for part of it because they concede that there is not sufficient proof to support such a decision. I suppose, depending on the type of capital, DWP may be able to obtain the evidence from a source other than the bank?

I’ve had a RFE case where at the time of death the capital was too high for the claimant to be entitled to PC. RFE then raised an overpayment on the basis that the full capital amount had existed as far back as they could go, the point at which the claimant’s means had last been assessed. Fortunately we were quite easily able to establish the capital had only gone over the limit during the last AIP so nothing was recoverable. It seemed to me that the approach RFE took was both unprincipled and lazy, and maybe that’s what they’re doing in your case.