What happens if you don't tell us about changes
What happens if you don't tell us about a change
We may pay you too much benefit
We're likely to go on paying the same rate of benefit as before and this may be wrong. We may need to change the amount we pay you or stop your benefit completely because of a change. If you don't tell us or are slow to tell us, we may have paid too much. If we do pay you too much:
- we will expect you to pay it back
About paying benefit back - we may take it back out of the benefit we're still paying you
- for Council Tax Benefit we'll take the money back out of your Council Tax account so you get a new bill showing more to pay
This may leave you short of money for other things.
We may not be able to pay you extra for past weeks if you take too long to tell us about something that would give you more benefit
If you take more than a month to tell us of a change that would give you more benefit, we can only increase your benefit from the date you told us.
If there are strong reasons that explain why you didn't tell us in time, we may be able to pay the extra money from an earlier date but this will not be common.
We may find out about a change in some other way and this will make us suspect fraud
We may need to ask our Fraud Investigation Group to check the situation.
If you don't report a change and don't have a good reason for this, you are committing a criminal offence, just as if you gave us false information or hid the truth.
Contents of What happens if you don't tell us about changes
- What happens if you don't tell us about a change (this page)
- Paying benefit back
