Urgent Help Tax Credits Overpayment

mrandmrsm

Hi,
Right long story...
My fiance got a letter in April 2009 saying that he had been overpaid child tax credits to just over £1,000 and was no longer entitled!
We immediately contacted them to dispute this and they said it was because they didn't receive his declaration which was sent to them in the envelope they provided. Anyway we appealed and didn't hear anything back for months and then got another letter demanding payment so wrote back immediately and haven't heard anything now for over a year. No letter through in April this year from them for the new tax year.
Now my fiance's mother (we used to live there) has just called us to say some from HM Revenue & Customs called say he must call them by 8pm tomorrow, he's called the proper number to be told it's been passed onto a recover agency, he now owes £990 and that's that!!

I have never had to deal with this before but it seems unreal to me that we appealed and appealed heard nothing despite sending letters asking for confirmation and now all of sudden it's with a recovery agency!!!

Call someone help us we don't know where to go from here and we certainly can't afford to give them that amount of money! We are barely making ends meet as it is!

System

You need to clarify if they actually received and responded to your appeals and if so where they sent their responses to. Since the recover agency contacted your fiances mother that would indicate that the Tax credit office don't have his current contact details.

Also if you did not receive a response did your fiance not contact the Tax credit helpline to try to find out why it was taking so long for him to hear anything back.

If your fiance sent the annual declaration back by post and they did not receive it then he would have recieved a reminder after 31st July 2008 giving him another 30 days to get the declaration in and they would have expected him to respond to that. If he did not contact them within that timescale then they would have terminated his claim and at the end of the tax year demanded back the payments he had received from 6th April 08 to 31st July 08.

If your fiance wants to check what correspondence was sent and where to he can make a Subject Access Request to the TCO and then consider disputing the overpayment again if he has more information in his favour to supply.

mrandmrsm

Hi,

We received a reminder but he got those every year so we thought nothing of it.
We did send reminder letts and we know they are aware of our new address so don't know why they called his mother.
We sent of the appeals as soon as we heard of the overpayment.

He's spoken to them on the phone tonight and they have no explanation of why we not heard from them at all!

mrandmrsm

Hi,
I'd really appreciate some more advice on this, we have sent another letter today after speaking to them last night and not being able to get through to right department due to the adverse weather condition we though they could call us and demand we call by 8pm tonight!
I have sent off a TC846 as well as a letter today - as I said before it's unreal that after over a year of no communication even though we did send them more letters to chase it up!