Acenden and arrears

[Sappho]

I have a secured debt and have been paying off arrears each month in an arrangement for the past three years, including a large lump sum. My statements are split in two with a separate "default fee account" My extra payments have not been going into this account and the "payment received" column is empty though I have made over 38 overpayments.
The extra money appears to go straight into the capital repayment.
I have rung the administrators today who have, as is their usual practice, a completely different set of accounts and can't answer my question.
I have a number of complaints bumbling along with the FSO and will refer this to them but I would like some help with the legal side of things. Is there any legal requirement to produce accurate and non-misleading accounts? Clearly there is a moral duty to treat the customer fairly but can anyone point me to a legal requirement to use an extra payment for the purpose it was intended?
Last year although we were in an arrangement we were told that the arrears were not going down and they needed more money. We refused and said we would pay the amount we had been paying. They applied to repossess our house as we had failed to reach agreement with them. It seems now that the reason the arrears were not going down was because they were not crediting our default account and were adding penalty charges although we were keeping to our side of the agreement.

[Sappho]

Re: Acenden and arrears

Yes, but in this case the "security" side is not relevant. I think it is a straight CCA 1974 matter.

[mgfboy]

Re: Acenden and arrears

on the loan surely there is a total including the underpayments/arrears and any monies are going to clear that total. Or are you saying they are applying more penalties etc because they are applying the repayment to the original loan and not clearing the arrears????

[Sappho]

Re: Acenden and arrears

The accounts are quite separate and the amounts outstanding on the default fee account need to be added to the main account to find the true amount we owe the company. The default fee account has a column with "payments received" but this shows no credits to the default fee account although we have made 38 overpayments. I would have expected the amount of overpayment (£30 per month) embedded in the amount we pay each month to appear in this column as it is an overpayment to pay off arrears. As there are arrears we have received penalties throughout (which I have disputed with some success via the FSO)

For example, I challenged two "litigation fees" imposed in the same month - probably an error on their behalf - one of these was recredited - but off the main account not the default account which still shows two.

hope this is clear?

[mgfboy]

Re: Acenden and arrears

fair enough I understand now ( it's friday)

Sounds like they are incompetent or their system cant split payments.Normally in a few cases I've seen arrears are normally cleared first before normal capital repayments are restarted.

I would have thought it was a breach of TCF at least.

[Sappho]

Re: Acenden and arrears

Treating Customers Fairly?

I think that is a good point that if you make a payment with an overpayment they don't have the capacity to split it. However, they asked for it to be done in this way.....i'm quite happy to make two payments if their system cannot cope.

thanks for your post, I'll put TCF into my letter - it's always worth doing as they make a big point of this on their website and it contributes to their Triple A rating with S and P, Moodys and fitch.