Does the Student Loans Company owe you money?

I found out today that I have overpaid for over a year (£170/month) this is a substancial part on my income…I am overdrawn nearly every month because I find it diffiuclt to make ends meat living in London, this money would have gone a long way to making my monthy wage go a lot further. I am absolutley outraged that they can do this, particulary in this finacial climate. It amounts to stealing!

I paid off my student loan in August. Despite eleven letters (and counting), we are now in a new financial year and those thieves are still taking deductions through PAYE. They have repaid £651 stolen during August – November, and still owe me £1600. I am on a reasonable salary, but losing this amount of money every month really is not reasonable: it is equivalent to the cost of maintaining, taxing, insuring and fuelling our car, and paying for my monthly tube ticket!

Well where do I start……

My husband paid off his student loan when he graduated in 2007, he entered full time employment and has been ever since. He changed companies in Jan 2010 and the SLC sent him a letter to say he owed them money. He sent across proof that he had paid off the full early redemption amount they sent across, this took about 4 months, funny that it took that long and it probably had nothing to do with it entering a new tax year. He gets bonuses at work so normally pays £200 a month, but when he gets a bonus they take around £600. We’ve added up they owe around £4,000 now not including interest. He hasn’t had his p60 yet and the companies accountant seems totally incapable of sorting out his statement of earnings. This is really getting on my edges now as we recently got married and paid for the wedding ourselves, this was made a lot harder due to them helping themselves.

I don’t get how they can say that all monies have been repaid, do absolutely squat about it, take their sweet time in sorting anything out, are happy to say that he has reaoid, yet we are stuck as the accountant is useless.

It’s no wonder working people in this country are sick of the way they are treated, I owe student loans money and am quite happy to repay, but for him it makes my blood boil.

It is so frustrating. They still keep taking the money even though I’ve twice been assured that they won’t take any more. The most laughable thing is that I had to send off copies of my payslips (April to August) so they’d be able to refund me – so I photocopied them …. BUT apparently, the date on the July payslip was ‘unclear’ … and so they didn’t refund me that! Common sense says that if I’d been paying £100 in April, £100 in May, £100 in June, and £100 in August, then there’s a HIGH probability that I’d also paid the £100 in the July too.

So, I’ve had to send another copy off, along with September’s payslip too because they still took £100 in Sep after assuring me that they’d been stopped. I called them, and they assured me that they’d definitely be stopped from then on.

GUESS WHAT!!! October’s payslip “Student Loan Deduction £100”

ALL YOU NEED IS A BOX IN EXCEL WHICH SAYS – ‘IF the amount payed <= 0 THEN STOP TAKING MY MONEY!"

I have now received two refunds. One in July last year for £1221 and another in October this year for £1058. Nothing other than a letter to say I am due a refund has been sent. However, I have just had a default notice appear for an amount of £388 on my credit file for my other loan from 2009.
This is because I stupidly didn’t fill out my deferment form in time which is my own stupid fault, however, the payment is not showing as settled even though it was paid and now I have a default on my credit file until 2015. I’ve worked so hard over the past few years to build up my credit rating with all my accounts showing “satisfactory” and now this big red default is showing. Had SLC not been taking £85 a month from my bank that I shouldn’t have been paying, maybe the default wouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s absolutely infuriating.
When I contacted them this week regarding the default, they tried to tell me that it was because I haven’t deferred this year! This was incorrect information to start with. I had already spoken to them weeks ago after they gave me the option of deferring or making a payment. I chose to start making payments (is this not a good thing?); a direct debit was set up by them starting this month, also covering the last two months. Then, after my frustrating conversation with them regarding the default, I received a letter 2 says ago (17th) dated the 8th November, saying I am in arrears for £60.20 and I have charges of £20!! What the hell is going on?!
Has anyone had any success with these issues? I’m off to Citizens Advice!

Just sent the Student Loans Co a SMALL CLAIM (for any amount in dispute up to 5k) from your local county court for the money they continue to take after the debt has been paid off. It will cost you approx £150 -£400 depending on how much per month they are stealing from your salary. The judge will order them to stop immediately and to pay the cost of the court case, and your small claim fee, and will award you interest. Do this immediately – the more people to do this – the rules will be changed quicker. You cannot argue with idiots.

I’m in the same situation as most people above I finished paying my student loan at Christmas 2012 but they continued to take my money even after the end of the financial year. Now that is stealing in my book. Owed just under £1’000.

Very nearly May 2014 and the saga continues. Nothing has changed.
I had to pay HMRC £1500 more than i owed because the student loans company and my accountant couldn’t alter the amount i had to pay.
I called both HMRC and SLC to find out when HMRC was going to pay the SLC. Neither company could actually put a date on it.
That was in January. It’s now the end of April.
I spoke to the SLC today.
My case is now ‘in review’. The SLC have written to HMRC asking for a ‘review’ of the account to check to see if the loan has been repaid. The HMRC will then contact the SLC to tell the SLC to write to me so i can organise getting a refund.
When I asked the SLC when this would happen, they ‘couldn’t put a date on it. It’s a bit of a waiting game really, just keep your eyes open for a letter from us, or HMRC’.

If i have to go down the producing payslips and having more lengthy phone conversations, particularly with computerised phone systems, am I allowed to charge them for the amount of time i spend sorting out what would seem to be their problem.

I’m currently self employed, very busy, and will end up losing money trying to sort it out. I will also probably incur costs from my accountant recovering payslips etc.

Also probably a silly question, but still. Do the SLC and HMRC pay interest on the money they owe me? I mean, I can’t even e-mail them. I’m sure that if I owed them money, they would be charging me.

Thoughts?

How is this legal? Having found that the student loans companies records were two years out of date from HMRC, they insisted that I send copies of all payslips for the two year period by post (not email!). After they received this, they entered the amounts on the payslips incorrectly to their systems. Having established that I have now cleared my loan, not only have they not managed to reimburse me the correct amount, they have continued to draw amounts now totalling £1500 from my pay as they havent sent my employer the signal asking them to stop, despite assuring me this was done months ago.
Is there any way to take them to court? I am livid and still out of pocket.

I paid off my student loan in January 2012, and made a series of overpayments which I was refunded.

in July of this year (2014), the SLC started taking deductions from my salary, apropos of nothing and without notifying me.

It took me two months to get to the bottom of it, and a further month to get some money refunded. But the SLC have said that HMRC are telling them that in July 2012, my employer at the time refunded me £331 and therefore they need that back.

I supplied all my payslips from 2012, which show no refund was made. I then was told that my employer definitely made the refund because HMRC has a note of it, and they are still refusing to give the £331 back and suggest i take it up with my former employer.

My former employer had 4 staff in 2012. He is a personal friend and neither of us has any recollection of him writing me a cheque (he doesnt have a cheque book) or giving me £331 in cash during that year! Why would he?! He didnt owe me the money. He’s having his accountant look into it. I have no idea how HMRC think this refund was made to me if not in my salary as they won’t provide any evidence.

The SLC refuse to answer my emails and I cant get hold of anyone on the phone. The only time they response is when I get my local MP involved.

As soon as I have absolute confirmation from my ex-employer I will be raising with the Ombudsman.

But I am still £331 down from July. it’s now November. It’s frankly criminal that SLC can just remove money from a person’s salary and provide no evidence as to why they’re taking it.

The student loan company are just in the dark ages!

I contacted them as I thought I might have finished my loan and I’m glad I did. My loan was already paid off at the end of the 2013-14 tax year and they owed me £1300 from that year, but they are still taking £300 each month so they’ll owe me even more once I cobble together my old pay slips.

Ridiculous that they don’t contact you directly when you’ve already paid the whole loan off and ridiculous that they still don’t accept emailed payslips (the first comments on this thread complaining about this are from 2011).

I will end up over-paying my student loan by about £4000 – a massive amount of cash!

I repaid my loan in November 2013 and provided payslips as evidence. I received a refund and thought that to be the end of the matter. February 2015 is the first time since then that a deduction has not been made.

I have complained to SLC, and received a standard ‘this is how we do things’ e mail in reply. I escalated my complaint and picked their response apart by highlighting several occassions in their own schedule of events where my deductions could have been stopped.

Their second response is basically saying ‘we told HMRC to send a stop notice’. But no one follows up to see if HMRC received the instruction, informs the employer, and whether the employer receives it and actions.

So my complaint has fallen into a black hole of passing the buck with no real hope in getting a satisfactory response. I have wasted time and money on phonecalls, printing and postage but I now am at the point where I dont think its worth any more of my time and effort.

I am at my wits end with this. I paid my student loan off in 2007. However, HMRC did not send end of year information from 2004/2005 tax year until 2013 and so student loans kept taking repayments as there was no evidence of my repayments for that year, where I paid off about £6k worth of the debt.
Now they have that information, it comes to light that they dont have it from 2003/4 tax year either. I sent them 3 payslips to show massive repayments of about £300 – £500 a month for that year. Despite the fact that I quite clearly therefore had made payments, worked for the same company, and it the case that they just dont have the information from HMRC, I am still having to pay my loan every month!
They have contacted HMRC who have said they have no further information to offer them, so unless I can find the rest of my payslips from 10 years ago, I am screwed and will have to continue to pay off the £2k they say I still owe, when actually, they probably owe me about £4 – 5k!! What is even more galling is that I will probably pay that £2k back way before the end of the tax year so then they will owe me even more money as they dont stop taking payments even when the balance is 0 – until HMRC tell them to at the end of the tax year!!!
Its just an absolute joke and essentially, I am being robbed!
I contacted Financial Ombudsman who said that they dont deal with SLC complaints after about 1995, that the SLC will go through their complaints procedure and then appoint an external body to investigate. What??? So they are in charge of their own complaints procedure and can decide when to go externally, meanwhile they continue to rob me every month!!!!
SOMETHING has to be done about this!! It is a disgrace!!

Well I have just had a hunt and found 2 more payslips from that year – one which is the final paycheck for the year so shows the accumulative amount of pay i received in that tax year. Surely it must be pretty simple for them to work out how much student loan I paid from that???
I will send them off….watch this space!!

Earlier in the year I received over £900 back from the SLC for over-payments on the previous year and was told that I would have to furnish payslips for for any outstanding monies owed. The HMRC are still taking payments from my wage. From what I have read above and on other websites, I believe that the SLC are under instruction from the government to do exactly what they are doing in order to collect as much money in as possible. One only has to look at how the ill and disabled are assessed for their benefits and subsequently cut off. What is going on is most certainly immoral if not illegal. Not only are they overcharging those who were forced to take out loans in order to fulfill their dreams of teaching or pursuing their chosen career paths but they are making it extremely difficult for one to get that which is owed back. No organisation can be so inept naturally at their job. I now intend to involve the ombudsman.

I over paid my student loan contributions after taking a short term contract at the start of the tax year. Student loan took £400 of repayments even though i earned well under the £17,000 threshold for the year. I’ve now called them multiple times and though they agree I am owed the money apparently their repayment system isn’t working and they don’t know when they’ll be able to process my refund. Its outrageous as if you are at all delayed making a payment to them they’d hound you with letters and fines but they can have my money for over a year and still not provide me with any timeline of when I should expect to receive a refund.