Benefits under and overpayments: Your views

A committee of MPs has said more than £2bn is being spent on benefit overpayments - Newsbeat listeners have been telling us what they think.

The committee said that administration errors by staff as well as mistakes by people claiming benefits meant £2.2bn was overpaid in 2010.

It also claimed £1.3bn was owed to people who had been underpaid.

The government said that this was a long standing problem it had inherited and that it was simplifying the system to stop errors.

Newsbeat has been speaking to some of you about your experiences with benefits.

_________________________________________________________

Andrew Coulson, 23, from the Wirral

"I applied for Jobseeker's Allowance while I had a part time job at the weekend.

"Despite this being on my initial application, nothing more was said about my job while I was there.

"Six months later I was told to pay back £500 because they'd completed my application wrong in concern with my hours, but I appealed and they admitted full fault."

Matthew Hyland, 31, from York

"A letter landed on the doorstep one morning - I opened it and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"I was a bit shocked but more bemused than angry.

"Obviously I paid it back but I didn't even know I'd been overpaid. I'd have to have an extra shed to keep all my benefit letters for the past 10 years.

"They couldn't tell me what it was just that I'd overpaid.

"It just shows that as an agency one person doesn't know what the other person is doing, nobody seems to speak to each other."

Gary Hutson

"I work over 40 hours a week and still receive benefits and I wouldn't be able to live without them.

"I have two kids to provide for, all you people who say benefits are for scum don't have a clue.

"I've worked since I was 15 and never been out of a job."

Jack Thompson, London

"It's not hard to get off benefits.

"It's not given to you on a spoon how to earn money but you don't expect that with everything do you?

"Not everyone on benefits is a scrounger but those who get uptight about it probably are."

Lee-Anne Trotter

"I was overpaid on working tax credits a few years ago and I am still paying it back now.

"I do not have a problem with having to pay the benefits back - I am quite lucky really because i was told I owed £6,500.

"A technical glitch in the computer system had occurred and once sorted I owed £1,300."