The National Audit Office (NAO) is launching a new investigation into the DWP’s handling of Carer’s Allowance (CA) overpayments, five years after being duped by the departments in the course of its previous inquiry.
The NAO confirmed in a letter to the Commons work and pensions committee that they will be looking into the progress made by the DWP in reducing CA overpayments since the last report by the NAO in 2019.
At that time, the NAO were assured by the DWP that the new Verified Earnings and Pensions alerts service provided by HMRC would virtually bring an end to large CA overpayments, because the DWP would be able to alert claimants as soon as they went above the earnings limit.
In fact, the DWP don’t bother to contact half of all the claimants about whom an alert is raised, meaning that hard-pressed carers’ lives are still shattered by sudden news of huge sums that they must repay to the DWP.
