Income Support overpayments (FOI)

Request

In the past five years:

A

How many instances have there been of Jersey's Social Security department overpaying Islanders Income Support payments?

B

How much money was overpaid?

C

How much money has been repaid by islanders?

D

How much money is outstanding?

Response

A to D

Debt arising from overpayment of benefit is managed on an individual basis and there is often overlap between claims and across benefits. To answer the questions accurately requires manual checking of individual claims and comments within.

Therefore it is not possible to answer this request as this analysis would exceed the 12.5 hour permitted timeframe for answering Freedom of Information requests. Article 16 (Cost excessive) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

The Department is working on processes and system improvements to be able to calculate this information in the future.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.