Recovery of Child Maintenance overpayment regulations

I have a client that is having her ongoing child maintenance payments reduced due to an overpayment from 1997-2003. CSA have more or less admitted it’s down to their error - their most recent letter to me states “The agency collected payments which were due to be paid to the Government and paid them to Mrs X instead. I sincerely apologise for this error”.

Child Support Handbook 18th edition states: ““The CSA cannot enforce the recovery of overpayments because of its own administrative error, but the person with care will be asked if she is prepared to repay them”. I’ve quoted this in my letter to them but to no avail. Instead they have agreed to make a consolotary payment of £75.00 to reflect the inconvenience she has suffered.

In their letter they state: Regulation 8 of the Child Support Regs 2009 allows them to reduce the amount of regular payable maintenance to £nil in order to recover the overpayment. There is no right appeal regarding this decision.

I’m struggling to find a regulation to support the advice given in the CPAG handbook. I’m also unsure which regs should apply, given that the overpayment occurred 1997-2003 but was only discovered in 2011.

Any comments or thoughts gratefully received.

Thanks

absolutely disgraceful!  have you considered judicial review?

Well I’ve found the regulation that they are referring to here.

Application of overpayments

This is intended to give powers for the CSA to reduce child support payments due retrospectively i.e. arrears, to recover from ongoing/future payments, and to reduce payments to nil where applicable, when they have identified an overpayment. It does say this can be for “any reason” but they are also able to consider the circumstances of the person and the period/amount that would be reasonable.

It’s been a while since I gave any advice on this, so I can’t really offer much more on challenges I’m afraid. Only other thing you might want to look at is this Gingerbread factsheet Using the Child Support Agency

Although it doesn’t cover overpayments, page 5 does have a concise explanation of the complaints process, including the Independent Case Examiner procedure. Good luck.