ERROR PLOT
AS THE Department for Work and Pensions seeks greater powers to snoop on people’s bank accounts and retrieve money after overpaying benefits in error, what could possibly go wrong?
Anti-poverty charities and disability campaigners recently warned DWP secretary Liz Kendall that “overpayment debt is a scandal in the making” after the department’s Debt Manager system logged more than 686,000 overpayment errors in Universal Credit payments alone last year. These debts are reclaimed via deductions to ongoing benefits, leaving people on meagre incomes with even less.