Paul Burns Kirklees

10/07/20 to 16/07/20 Still awaiting further instruction on how to process our Covid-19 Self-employed review cases. Short week this week as not in work on Tuesday. Both my VEP tasks ( wage updates via electronic update from HMRC) resulted in overpayments. Looking at one of the claims I disagreed with how colleagues had assessed entitlement. The average wage we had been using to assess entitlement was significantly lower than the claimant's actual wage most months. My colleague had notepadded that the claimant's wages do fluctuate so I left things as they are only updating the wages from when they recently reduced. For another claim I had written to enquire about a chid reaching the age of 18. I had noticed that the claimants wages and also childcare cost expenses (CCC) had not been updated in a long time. A check via HMRC website showed that wages had not significantly changed. I wrote out for proof of CCC & received a memo advising that the claimant had rung in res...

05/07/20 to 11/07/20 More replies to our Covid-19 self-employed review letters have come back but we are still awaiting further instruction on how to treat the information provided. This weeks wage updates via VEP tasks from HMRC both involved increased wage amounts. One was from last week only so there was no overpayment. The second one had not had their wages reviewed by us since 2017. Their wages are now significantly more than in 2017 and so I updated our records. Some new CTR claims received in May now cropped up again as they had been outstanding for over a month. I had written to these claimants at the time but had no response. One was not liable for the Council Tax; the next one had had his UC claim terminated so I'd asked if he still wished to apply for CTR; a third one was also not liable for Council Tax but the taxpayer had 25% single person discount. I informed our Council Tax department that there is another adult at the property. The claimant being supported ...

28/06/20 to 04/07/20 More  of my Covid-19 Self-employed review forms have been returned. However we have now received revised instructions regarding how to treat the SEISS grants. The instruction now is to input as income up to 31/05/2020 only even though the grant is intended to cover a 13 week period and the ones I have dealt with so far only received their payments on the 19th or 20th May. We then received further instruction to hang fire and wait for an update. The wage updates from HMRC records ( a VEP task) this week resulted in updating wages for one claimant as the average wage we had been using was not a true representation. We had taken an average of 5 weeks of which 2 were much lower than every other wage in the past 9-10 months. The other VEP was similar but had no effect as the claimant had no tax credits in payment as they didn't want to have to end their HB claim and go onto UC. Another claim had ATLAS items relating to a change in circumstances on a UC claim....