SFE sent letter stating student loan overpayment

[longtompot]

Has anyone experienced this? Did you get a reason as to why yours had been overpaid and you owe them £X amount?
My ed has received a letter today and before opening it also had a phone call, which I took as she was unavailable. They say they overpaid her from 2018/19 £2000 but no reason as to why they think that.
This is all we can find online which doesn't apply to her

Grant and loan overpayment
Your student finance payments are made at the start of each term to help with costs for the full term ahead.
If, for any reason, your entitlement for the academic year is reassessed and reduced, this could result in you being paid too much grant and/or loan. This is what we call an ‘overpayment’.
Example
You’re getting a Maintenance Loan of £6,000, which will be paid over 3 terms.
You’ll be paid £2,000 at the start of term 1.
You’ll be paid another £2,000 at the start of term 2.
You leave your course during term 2, meaning you aren’t entitled to the full £2,000 you’ve already been paid.
This means you’ve now been overpaid and need to pay some of it back.
You’ll normally need to repay your loan overpayment separately and earlier than the rest of your loan balance. This also applies if you’re already having repayments taken from your salary or your tax return.
A loan or grant overpayment is when you’ve been paid money that you’re no longer entitled to because of a change in your circumstances. This means it now needs to be paid back.
In some cases, loan and grant overpayments can be recovered from future student funding.
Based on government regulations, the SLC has a legal responsibility to recover any loan or grant overpayment.

Yes, it's because they think she left the course early. It happened to me when I left my postgrad early. It often takes ages for SFE to realise because you, as the student, cannot inform them, the university has to do it and that seems to take bloody years.

She will have to pay it back straight away as well. The earning thresholds don't count for overpayments and SFE will send it to a debt collection agency if she doesn't repay which, unlike an ordinary student loan, will affect your credit rating. They will, or did, send it onto a debt collection agency in my case despite me being in dispute with them about it.

If she didn't leave her course early, she'll need to get onto it really fast to challenge it with SFE and ensure her university clarify, in writing to her and SFE, that she didn't leave her course early.

Otherwise, it's simply easier to pay them back or reach an agreement with them to pay it back.

That's just crazy! She certainly didn't leave early. She finished her course and graduated with a first.
She'll phone sfe and get them to tell her why they feel she has been overpaid and then will contact the Uni she was at and see what they say.
So much stress she really doesn't need. Thank you for your help @MakingM2

I know, it is very stressful and their phone lines aren't the best. I personally never spoke to the same person twice. If you have to speak to more than one person, their knowledge is limited to whatever the previous person has written in the notes which was often nothing at all! Let her know there's no point in stressing about it. It's a very bureaucratic organisation so it may take a while.

I highly recommend putting everything in writing, along with proof that she completed and didn't withdraw from her course at all and send it by recorded delivery if the first phone contact doesn't resolve the issue. That's what I did and I'm not sure the situation would ever have been resolved if I hadn't.

Good luck. Hope it's sorted out asap.

She phoned them today, and the people on the phone have no idea either. They say they sent a letter last year about it which she never received. Her account has been frozen for 21 days and she will get a call back from a manager within 48 hours to see if they can tell her why this has happened. So, no further ahead, but pleased they weren't immediately demanding the money.