Self Assessment repayment delays

Elaine_Wilson

This is not a query, but I thought the information might be useful to some of you.

Yesterday HMRC published the June edition of Working Together which is a sort of newsletter for agents. If you are interested you can access a copy online by clicking the name.

In this they apologise for delays which have slowed down some repayments this year. They explain that they are making additional manual security checks which obviously take time. What they don't mention is that there was a concerted organised attempt at fraud in January. I've no idea how succssful that was.

As it is our money they are trying to protect I suppose the basic message is please be patient and give them a little more lattitude than normal.

Pennywise

Elaine_Wilson wrote: »

As it is our money they are trying to protect I suppose the basic message is please be patient and give them a little more lattitude than normal.

I think almost everyone understands the potential fraud aspect and supports HMRC in what they are doing, BUT the major problem was complete and absolute lack of communication within HMRC and to taxpayers. It was another complete foul up within HMRC as to advising their own customer-facing staff and the taxpayers as to what was going on.

Their systems showed repayments had been issued. Their call centre staff confirmed repayments had been issued. This caused untold amounts of extra work for taxpayers and accountants in trying to find out where the repayments had gone, i.e. regular checking with bank, etc.

We were told several times by HMRC staff to write in to the Collector of taxes and ask for a duplicate cheque to be raised as the original appeared to have been lost in the post. Of course, the original had never been issued in the first place, but the HMRC staff didn't know, so again, lots of wasted time and effort writing in to them!

How hard is it to actually tell the customer service staff that there was an operation in place that would delay some repayments? How hard is it to place some form of note on the file that it was being held back? How hard would it have been to properly resource the checking department so that there were only delays of a few days rather than several weeks or even months?

I think we are all at the end of our tether with the constant HMRC foul-ups - in this case, HMRC probably have done the right thing and perhaps should be applauded for it, but as usual, their quality of "delivery" was hopeless and that is where they deserve the continued criticism.