Applying for a BB and looking for offers of help for the verbal and physical assessment.

michael57

2oldcodgers said:

poppy123456 said:

2oldcodgers said:

I don't have my award letter - it was sent to the LA in 2020 when I last renewed the BB.

Yet in another thread last week you said you’ve kept every letter since 1996. See link https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/727436#Comment_727436
I wouldn’t expect any LA or DWP to return any evidence or proof of benefits you send. For this reason you should only ever send copies. 

I do and have. And thank goodness that I did. Back in 2020 at my last BB renewal I extracted letters/reports going back to 2014 and sent them to the LA.
If I had have destroyed them then there would have been problems for the 2020 renewal with no evidence of the award or length that could be sent in.

As for sending copies my LA indicated that they wanted to see the originals and presumably not 'doctored' copies which is so easy to do.

i believe they do accept copies if they are certified and signed and dated by a solicitor 

poppy123456

My LA do not ask for originals. Signed and dated by a solicitor is a little extreme in my opinion, especially as they may charge you for this. 

chiarieds

I'm surprised at the unwillingness of any LA to not accept copies of needed documentation (& can't think these would be needed to be signed by a solicitor). 

2oldcodgers

chiarieds said:

I'm surprised at the unwillingness of any LA to not accept copies of needed documentation (& can't think these would be needed to be signed by a solicitor). 

My LA is simply following what other government departments are doing along with banks etc. It is child's play to 'doctor' a document either retained as a PDF or Word document. Additionally a photocopy is the easiest document to change.
Only those copies stamped, signed and dated by a solicitor 'as a copy of the original' are as acceptable as the real document.

Otherwise people would be submitting bogus documents with the intention to deceive. In fact a case locally of a builder who purported himself to have purchased plasterboard for installation in all of the homes on a new estate was sent to prison for defrauding HMRC (VAT) to the tune of over £700,000. All of his invoices submitted to HMRC were fictitious and that he had done no work whatsoever. Nice I suppose if you can get away with it.

Fraud involving Blue Badges in its many ways is rife.

Jimm_Alumni

I will note that benefits fraud is vastly over-assumed. While it hovers a bit above and below 1% of the budget a survey done several years ago showed that people on average thought over 20% of the budget was fraudulent. Over 20 times the actual number.

Personally, I'd rather a few fraud cases happened and got caught after the fact than people in need got nothing.