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Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

theguardian.com

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Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#31

Post by philjohn »

15457345234 wrote: post #29
radiator wrote: post #14

> ... asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.

> administered by Capita if you know

Oh, I know. This is the same Capita pensions who recently suffered a data breach.

I worked for a company who was acquired by them and, well, as you said, if you know, you know.

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#32

Post by donalhunt »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #7
cornholio wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how an obvious bug that should have led to a rejection of the delivery of the system - or an emergency fix as per the support requirements these large contracts always come with - has instead transformed into official DfE policy. That's just so typical of the newfangled digital bureaucracy: it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software.

I think the proper thing is a judge issues and order for them to stop doing that. And when they do it again someone spends a weekend in jail.

GDPR has a provision to correct information stored by organisations. It may get interesting once they believe you are dead though because GDPR only applies to living people. :/

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#33

Post by smeej »

userbinator wrote: post #30
wslh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more fair: it is easy to check if they are alive or not. This is not rocket science.

In these times, it is only easy in-person.

Even so, a pension system for UK schoolteachers probably does have the bandwidth to get an in-person identity check done.

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#34

Post by otikik »

wslh wrote: post #28
zimpenfish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...

To be more fair: it is easy to check if they are alive or not. This is not rocket science.

So is to add an extra field “different deceased person with same name”

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#35

Post by flir »

pydry wrote: post #23
zimpenfish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...

To be equally fair, "Crapita" (as private eye calls them) is an incompetent joke that scores government contracts through corruption and then pays the bare minimum (below minimum wage in one case) to the providers of its services. There are lots of examples like the one a above.

> as private eye calls them

...and their customers... suppliers... partners... employees...

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#38

Post by aaronmdjones »

"Huh, why is this even a difficult thing"

> the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link

... and there it is. Crapita, the source of all woes, decided to do a just-good-enough job rather than a good job.

Come on. Even DVLA can handle the case where 2 (or more) people have the same first and last name, and middle initial, and date of birth, when issuing driving licences. They don't mix those up.

Re: Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

#39

Post by chokma »

Swiss pensions for foreigners are also only paid if the recipient proves they are alive once a year. My father had to sent proof of being alive for decades.

To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.

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