I would double check your bank statements to see if you were paid two payments of £14.38 in 2019 from them. If you have only recieved one payment, or haven't received any payment at all from them, then even if this letter were legitimately from EMR they wouldn't be entitled to a penny from you.
I recognise that it was two and a half years ago so may be difficult to do so, but can anybody confirm if there actually was an 18:19 from St Pancras to Market Harborough on 26/09/2019? If there wasn't then this would clearly be a scam.
A delay repay amount of £14.38 can be for a 30-59 minute delay on a ticket that cost £28.75, or for a 15-29 minute delay on a ticket that cost £57.50. It isn't possible for this to be an amount for a delay of 60 minutes plus as that would be the cost of the full ticket, which is always rounded to the nearest 5p.
All fair points but the OP has stated their are no duplicate payments of £14.38 into their bank account (I assume they checked and double checked of course) - but one of £14.38 and one of £14.50 on close but different dates.
The letter from EMR posted does not claim that they made
duplicate payments (as I read it) but that duplicate
claims were made for the same journey resulting in an "overpayment" (one claim being manual and one being "automatic" whatever that means (but could eg be a on line claim and a paper form claim for example)).
Now you would expect some part of the process at EMR's end to prevent such claims at audit or processing stage, but as stated by
@LowLevel D-R was v recent at that time for EMR and thus systems not fully worked up well or it may well be that said 'audit' is only happening now, probably after a DfT missive or official has told them to trawl through the files for fraud and error and seek to reclaim it.
The OP has stated if the request from EMR is not fraud they are on balance minded to pay it since they may have employment issues if EMR can proove they are right and the issue escalates. I think this may be wise point of view (when matters checked with EMR) since we know from the vast thread about Abellio Greater Anglia Trains doing a massive fraud trawl of D-R claims / potentiality fraudulent claims last year that pretty soon people stared getting letters from the British Transport Police (BTP) inviting them into to discuss their claims.
Juts for OP's info - Abellio Greater Anglia is a sister franchise of Abellio East Midlands Railway - so it is possible they are now 'sharing best practice' in this sort of thing (as they would call it....)
Obv I'm not seeking to scare
@Slowtrain into just paying up - just posting this for context. If the OP can defend their claims record with reasonable info I would strongly urge them to do so, as I would do that if it were me (but you may need a good filing system of on line and paper claim form copies from 2+ years ago to do that of course).