HMRC have lost £1000 of our money

4Chickens

I have found where the missing money is.

I know the Sort Code it went to, the account name the batch it was included in, the kill bundle number, basically everything.

And how did I find all this out? I phoned Natwest Centralised Collections and they told me everything. So I have emailed my accountant with all the details and fingers crossed all will be resolved by the end of the month.

How did this happen, you may wonder. Well, I'm a numpty and I transposed two numbers in the tax reference that I wrote on the back of the cheque. And I am an even bigger numpty because I didn't check this first.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who took the time to offer your advice to the biggest numpty

chrismac1

I hope it turns out like that, and it might. What I can tell you is that in my PAYE case we wrote 4 separate letters spanning 6 months telling them exactly where the cheque had gone, and specifying tax references it had been allocated to - and it still took a Complaint case before a finger came out from where the sun does not shine. Let's hope yours is dealt with more efficiently than that.

Mikeyorks

4Chickens wrote: »

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who took the time to offer your advice to the biggest numpty

At least you came back to confess - most don't. The crossing stamp on the front of the cheque is 'NatWest centralised unpaids' - it's there in order any Bank who bounces one of these cheques routes it back to HMRC via NatWest.

The SA reference the payment has gone to is that on the audit trail. Presumably that's the one you quoted - but which isn't yours? Most simple transpositions will fail - as the SA reference is check digit protected. And the one you have quoted is invalid - so I'm curious as to how it got as far as the audit trail! Which is printed on the 2nd pass on this type of cheque processing system - which is only when the transaction has been accepted.

So - hopefully the £1000 is in a suspense account. And - therefore - a puzzle as to why it hasn't been tracked / allocated before now. As HMRC have the facility of Tracing your Sort Code / account number through a payment store. And that would bring up a match with one of your correctly allocated earlier payments? Unless, perversely, you've just switched Bank accounts at that point.

But at least the money in Suspense is less of a chore than had it gone to the wrong SA record. As it would likely have been repaid or offset to the wrong customer by now.

However it does point up what I said at post #4 :

But where a payslip has to be manually created from a UTR (eg) written on the back of the cheque - real potential of human error with transcription errors

- when you consider you made an error on a single payment - and HMRC get hundreds of these to create manual payslips on a daily basis when SA is in full flow. If you add poorly written figures to transcription problems it really does dramatically increase the potential of error.

A machine printed payslip is processed with 100% accuracy via the OCR cameras. If you don't have one to send with the cheque, then you're much better using an alternative payment method that proofs the reference at source.

Electronic payment via your own Bank is not the Utopia certain people on here would have you believe. As it's still entirely reliant on your entering the UTR accurately in the Reference field. And people screw that up just as much as they do on the reverse of a cheque. The certain methods are DD or BillPay via your SA online.