09/05/20 to 14/05/20

This week almost exclusively involved registering new claims for CTR received via a claim for UC and then assessing CTR claims received last month where the UC award info is now available. Again there are some who don't qualify but might when we get their 2nd monthly UC award breakdown.

The claim I wrote about in the Blog dated 24/04/20 cropped up again. One of the joint tenants had realised or been told that the 'bedroom tax' had been incorrectly imposed on the HB claim. They had discussed the matter with a Housing Officer at Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing who emailed me asking me to look into it. I replied back to advise that I had tried to be pragmatic and act in the best interests of the customer by ensuring the claim was correct going forward. This is because the CTR part had also been incorrectly processed and the other tenant who was 1/3 liable for council tax had had CTR awarded based on 50% liability. When we corrected this in September 2019 we didn't go back and put things right back to 2012 when the 1/3 liability started. I had gone along with that decision when I looked at the claim on 23/04/20. Correcting the HB side of the claim back to October 2018 would create an underpayment of £438. Correcting the CTR side would mean an extra £1000+ Council Tax to pay. The Housing Officer went back to the tenant to discuss it with them, gave them the facts & left it with them if they wished to pursue it. I also had a homeless person claim who had flitted from a property run by Fusion Housing but we only found this out when we were informed that he had then turned up a week later and presented as homeless and was housed for two nights at a hostel and then moved from the hostel to another Fusion property. We were still paying HB for the first address. He was now at his 3rd address. I knew from past experience that I had to wait for the HB to pay out for the first address up until the date he left the go back into the claim to pay HB for the 2 days at the hostel then go back into the claim a 3rd time to put HB into payment for the 3rd address.

From this week I have learned that being pragmatic can be the best course (see above). Also that joint tenant claims require very careful thought. Also that payment schemes, i.e getting the payee right, are temperamental on our Northgate system and that a mistake can easily be made and then take a lot of time & effort to put right.

Going forward I will take my time with joint tenant claims.

Comments

  1. Sandeep16 May 2020 at 15:10

    In terms of being pragmatic, it is the best decision as underpayments can always be paid until the following payment run but overpayment require recovery. Your experience shows here - well done.

    Re joint tenants - there are many different rules here so always best to take your time and consult the regulations before processing these claims. It's very easy to make errors on them

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

23/12/19 TO 29/12/19 No Level 4 Apprenticeship work done this week. Had an unusual scenario with a claim where I have revised a decision made in Aug/Sept 2019 that caused hb entitlement to cease. The decision was to impose a maximum non-dependant deduction and was absolutely correct at the time. Claimant has now been awarded PIP and this has been backdated to the start of the year. As PIP is a designated benefit I can add it as income from the start pf the award & this changes the decision made in Aug/Sept. To submit as evidence for S2.4 on Skilsure.
Read more
13/01/20 to 18/01/20 Awarded ctr for a customer's previous address that had somehow never been awarded. I had received details of her change of address but couldn't see why she had not had ctr credited to her ctax a/c for the old address. I was able to award the ctr right back to 26/02/18 as we had received an electronic claim document as a result of a UC claim back then but at that time but we didn't have our work processes sorted out and were inviting people to claim rather than treating those electronic documents as actual claims. Other processing was more straightforward this week. Lots of ATLAS also as usual.
Read more