Appeal student finance

How likely is to win an appeal against student finance?
After assessing me, they concluded that I made false claims in regards to childcare grant. They withdrew all funding 2021-2023 and registered me with CIFAS. I want to appeal , but not sure how and what evidence can I provide .

(edited 7 months ago)

Reply 1

cifarce

One thing I can tell you is if you have a CIFAS marker by definition SFE claim you have broken the law.

https://www.cifas.org.uk/contact-us/subject-access-request/subject-access-request-form

When they submit you you just get 'a marker'. The marker doesn't really give you useful information.

https://www.cifas.org.uk/fraud-prevention-community/member-benefits/data/nfd/nfd-principles

The next thing you will notice in the link above is principle 4. So before you even start 'appealing' with SFE. The first thing you should do is make a subject access request for the information SFE hold on you. Make SFE point out the lawful reason... This doesn't mean the marker, this means the specific law they claim you have broken. Then get SFE to provide the supporting evidence for this.

Now if they provide you the legislation then great... You know the exact thing SFE have accused you of and you will have a starting point to structure a complaint or 'appeal'. If they can't provide the legislation (which I suspect they may not be able to do, as I have yet to find an organizational member of CIFAS who can actually commit to a piece of legislation having spoken to a lot of people with markers).

A good assumption with SFE is that 'application fraud' will appear in this somewhere, probably in the marker, you probably wont get a response beyond that. Much of the law around fraud and applications involves the proving intent. So for example, even if your application showed perhaps a certain income and a document you submitted showed a different income this could be used as evidence. If it was a small amount difference intent would be harder to prove, if it was a misread character on a paper application, ie £13,000 and £18,000 where the 3 or 8 was illegible, but even if it was something like a misunderstanding of net/gross or mixing up income with assets. The onus is on SFE to prove this... Not you to defend it. What I would suspect is any interaction with SFE will involve you being questioned without knowing exactly what you have been accused of and exactly what evidence is being used. And I would suspect the person you've spoke to at SFE may not know this either.

Now we don't know the marker details fully, but say if intent played a part, it is up to SFE to have evidence in their system already (prior to the CIFAS submission) of your deliberate intentions to mislead. Now this itself could be the key for you making a case that the marker submission was unlawful.

Anyway, I hope some of this information is useful. I have been speaking to lots of people with markers that have no basis being submitted. I have only by chance happened across this forum using google. And I notice a lot of people use this forum for scams offering to remove markers for money etc... That is not what I am trying to do. I also worked briefly at SFE many years ago before I even discovered CIFAS, probably before SFE used it, but I had no exposure to CIFAS with my time there, so I have some insight in how SFE operate, you only have to look at newspapers to understand what I mean by this.