problems reporting self-employed earnings

following on from my post at https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/14548/

Is anyone else coming across clients who are having regular problems reporting self-employed earnings on time due to apparent IT problems with their UC account?

Our concern is that this may not be a problem specific to our clients UC account but a systemic problem faced by many self-employed UC claimants.

In our clients case nearly every month he has to request the specialist self-employed work coach at the Jobcentre to put a ‘report your earnings and expenses’ ToDo onto the account (it does not appear automatically on the last day of the AP). It appears the work coach is having to use a ‘work around’ to overcome a glitch in the IT. This means client is frequently a few days late reporting earnings. In some APs this means no earnings are taken into account in that AP’s payment but two months reported earnings are then taken into account in the next AP.

It gets worse. In AP’s were no earnings are taken into account due to late reporting UC is generating an overpayment because “the payments that were paid to you did not take account the earnings that you had reported”. DWP accept their error - but then start recovering the o/p AND take those same earnings into account (without deduction for allowable expenses) in the next AP (in addition to the earnings reported for that AP) = ‘double whammy’!

Peter, did you ever find a solution for this?  Your almost 4 year old post just came up when I searched for this topic.  I have a client who has reported her self employment every month since she started.. But she had problems with the to dos not appearing. and UC do not seem to be able or willing to process earnings reported through journal entries. So out of 9 times UC missed her earnings completely 6 times. And they used a different figure 2 out of the 3 times when they did take the income into account.  She has an overpayment now.