Pensioners who do not tell the State about all their assets are being increasingly caught out - after they're dead. As a result of a clampdown which the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs has been quietly implementing for the past few years, the estates of 500 deceased pensioners a year are being made to pay back an average of £6,000 to £8,500 each.
This is the average overpayment in non-contributory pensions received by people who concealed some of their assets when they were being means-tested.
People on means-tested pensions are allowed to have some savings without affecting their non-contributory welfare payments. These can be as low as £3,000 for a single person, with over £5,000 allowed to widows. When savings go over these thresholds, the pension is reduced on a sliding scale.
With about 30,000 people dying annually, the figures mean that about one death in 60 brings a pay-back to the Department - and an unpleasant shock to would-be inheritors.
In the first half of this year, the Department has got back £1.8 million from the estates of pensioners who hid some of their assets. This compares with £1.2 million for all of 1992.
Since 1991 the executors or solicitors of deceased pensioners have been obliged to provide the Department with a schedule of the assets of the person who has died. More recently, the Department has made a determined effort to force solicitors and executors to abide by these obligations.
These efforts have included meetings with the Incorporated Law Society, which placed a notice in its journal in 1995 making solicitors aware of their obligations. Some solicitors who allegedly ignored these obligations have been reported to the Law Society by the Department.
But that is not the only measure used by the Department in its determined efforts to pursue its debtors beyond the grave.
It also gets a computer tape from the Probate Office of all grants of probate every year. "This Department then computer-matches that tape against our deceased pensioners," it says. "Cases are extracted where there are more assets on the grant of probate than were assessed for pension purposes. Those cases are then investigated."
The principle behind the recovery of money from estates, it says, is that these estates were "artificially" boosted because pensioners were getting bigger pensions than they were entitled to.
"This is unfair to taxpayers who funded the pension in the first place, and also to those other pensioners who declared their means position fully and openly at all times and who were paid at the correct rate.
"The Department always seeks 100 per cent recovery on all overpayments assessed in estate cases," it adds. "However, in some cases it may not be possible or equitable to recover the full sum, for example, where there are not sufficient assets in the estate, where the pensioner had physical or mental ill-health during their lives, and as a result could not have been expected to be aware of their own finances or of the obligation to notify the Minister of increases in their means."