Social Security Scotland official error statistics: FOI release

Information requested

I understand that ‘official errors’ occur when the recipient of a payment is either paid too much or too little by Social Security Scotland.

I would like to request the following information regarding official errors:

Request for information 1 – The total number of ‘official errors’ that have been recorded by Social Security Scotland in relation to all type of benefit payments that Social Security Scotland is responsible for in the financial years 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 so far.

Please make it very clear how many official errors have been recognised for each benefit and also make it clear for each benefit how many have been an underpayment and how many official errors were overpayment.

Request for information 2 – The number of official error overpayments that have been taken back or recouped by Social Security Scotland.

Please also reveal how many official error overpayments were written off and not taken back.

Please provide this for each benefit and in the years 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 so far.

Request for information 3 – The total amount of money paid to each benefit that was recognised as official error overpayment that has been written off and not recouped to date.

In other words the total amount of money, since each payment/benefit started, that has been written off, not recouped by Social Security Scotland.

If possible please provide the figure broken down by each year as well.

Response

Social Security Scotland categorises official error as error which can be attributed to action that the Agency has taken in error, this does not include where a Client has made an error.

Request for information 1–
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information processed by our Client Services Delivery area would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.

Our case management system does not currently capture information on official error on over and underpayments generated by the agency as a whole. To provide you with this we would have to manually interrogate every under and over payment case to understand which had been official error.

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

It is unlikely that your question could be narrowed to allow the costs to be brought below £600, however you may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: https://www.foi.scot/how-do-iask

I have enclosed some of the information held by the authority requested in part one where some analysis has been undertaken.

For additional information I have linked Social Security Scotland’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2023-2024, this includes some Error information that you may find useful, specifically on page 56.

Annual Report and Accounts 2024

Request for information 2 –
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. Social Security Scotland does not record payments received against the type of error. Accounts show the amount that is due to be recovered and the value of payments received in total and therefore we cannot tell you how much has been recovered specifically for official error overpayments. To understand this we would have to go into every official error case to manually review and calculate this.

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

It is unlikely that your question could be narrowed to allow the costs to be brought below £600, however you may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: https://www.foi.scot/how-do-iask

For additional information I have linked Social Security Scotland’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2023-2024, this includes some Recoveries information that you may find useful, specifically on page 58.

Annual Report and Accounts 2024

If the information within the annual report and accounts is helpful you may want to reframe your question around this data, we could provide you with, for example, money recovered from Clients per month since the report.

Request for information 3 –
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information processed clerically by our Recoveries Team would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.

The data on write offs which is recorded clerically is not broken down by categories such as Official Error, to understand how many of these fell under this category a manual trawl of all 2822 clerical write offs would need to be undertaken.

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

You may wish to narrow the timeframe of your request to a specific quarter to allow the costs to be brought below £600, however you may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: https://www.foi.scot/how-do-i-ask

I have enclosed some of the information held by the authority requested in part one where some analysis has been undertaken.

For additional information I have linked Social Security Scotland’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2023-2024, this includes some Error information that you may find useful, specifically on page 56.

Annual Report and Accounts 2024

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202500456171 - Information Released - Annex

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