How can the CSA’s figures be so far off?

April 14, 2015

I’ve been receiving maintenance payments through the CSA since 2006, sometimes regularly and sometimes sporadic. It was never something I relied on as I never knew if and when the next payment would appear.

I didn’t receive any payments for around a 2 year period – this was backdated and the arrears were added to payments which miracle upon miracle started to be received regularly. All was as expected until a few weeks ago, after the annual update of what I should expect to receive was followed several days later with another letter stating I had been overpaid to the amount of just over £2700.

Obviously this is a fairly sizeable amount so I requested a breakdown of my account and how they got to this number. The summary arrived just over a week later after my case was “looked at carefully” and holy hell I’m not sure who does their filing but they need to look up the meaning of chronological because the payment dates listed jumped from one year to the next and back again.

I downloaded statements dating as far back as 2005 and cross checked actual payments received with alleged payments and found the discrepancy to be just over £800 in overpayments, not their amount of £2700. So I’ve fired off another email (I’m a great believer in paper trails) and have offered to post off copies of my bank statements so they can look into this further as their figures are way off.

I’ve only ever went on what they’ve said I’m due, if there has been an overpayment then fair enough, it wasn’t my money and I shouldn’t have had that in the first place but I’m not going to just accept such a hugely inflated sum that is so far off the mark especially as it wasn’t my mistake that has brought this about, it’s been theirs.

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