DMBM121055 - Maintain Charges (Financial) by IT System: Maintain Charge (Financial) in SAFE: Permanent Overpayments in SAFE

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A permanent overpayment can arise in SAFE on the

  • Customer Account Record (CAR)
  • Unallocated Payments Worklist
  • Unmatched Payments Worklist

There is only one category of Permanent Overpayment (POP) in SAFE.

Customer Account Record

If a small excess payment of £2.00 or less is created as a result of

  • a charge amendment

or

  • a payment being applied to a charge record

and the interest position for the charge is cleared, no attempt is made by the systemto reallocate it regardless of whether there are other outstanding liabilities on the sameCAR. The small excess payment is automatically moved to Unallocated Payments andclassified as a POP.

Unallocated Payments Worklist

Items held in the Unallocated Payments Worklist can be classified as POPs. Where nofurther charges are expected for the customer, and there is no prospect of repayment, forexample, where a customer has gone unknown, the payment can be classified as a POP. Apayment is classified as a POP by selecting Permanent Overpayment (Write-off) within theManage Unallocated Payments Worklist.

Unmatched Payments Worklist

To classify an item as a POP on the Unmatched Payments Worklist the same process as forthe Unallocated Payments Worklist is followed. However, the access point is through theManage Unmatched Payments Worklist. Where all efforts to identify the source of a paymenthave been exhausted, an unmatched payment can be allocated to POP.

Reports

As part of the Department’s reconciliation process for POPs, a report is requiredproviding the summary information of the total items and amounts allocated to POP for aspecific period. This will be used by the Consolidated UK Balance (CUBA) team to provide aPOP figure for all Head of Duty systems.

A list of individual POP items within amount ranges for a specific period can be producedon request.

Cancellation of a POP

Amounts classified as POPs can be reversed by using the function Manage Charge andselecting Reverse POP.

Repayment Interest that is incorrectly created

If an amount of repayment interest (RPI) created outside of SAFE, and applied to a SAFErecord, cannot be cancelled, the amount should be treated as a specific POP classification‘9’. These are credits that are not original payments. The RPI credit will haveto be transferred from SAFE to OAS so that it can be allocated to the correct POPclassification.