Does the Student Loans Company owe you money?

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!!