my income tax refund was all wrong

Anji_V

hello!!

i hope someone can shed some light on a query of mine.

i applied in december for an income tax refund. I was expecting a refund of £150 but to my surprise was sent a cheque for £400. excellent you may think! but no! on the employment history page that they sent with the cheque i was put down as having worked at 2 places i had never worked at in 2003. and the majority of the refund was linked to 1 of these employments. i banked the cheque and phoned HM Revenue up to explain the situation. i told the man i didnt recall working at these places. and he kind of insisted that i had! finally he said he would pass it over and someone would investigate. i assumed they would ask me to pay them back the difference (my reasoning for banking the cheque. if i gave it back i was scared i would never see a penny from them again!) but i got another ammended cheque in the post for around £200! and on the letter it said that the previous cheque was now cancelled. but the money was already in my bank!!! are the bank authorised to take the money out of my account if HM Revenue instructed them to?? i banked this new cheque knowing full well that the previous cheque amount was sitting nicely in my savings acount. but the silly !!!!!!s had still made a mistake. i had told them i had not worked at these TWO places i was down for but they had only removed ONE off the list. my mum told me said i should tell them about the second place too (which amounted to about £50 income tax refund) otherwise they would chase me in the future with interest on top (is the interest thing true? can they do that if they are the ones that made the mistake) and being a good citizen and all that. i phoned HM Revenue about 2 months later (i had been busy!). I asked the man why this had happened. had someone been using my NI number. and he said this happens sometimes, sometimes people accidently send in the wrong NI number on their forms and their tax will be messed up too. but my NI number is registered to my name! so what is he talking about! so dumb. clearly someones not doing their job properly. he said someone would investigate. again! so i got another letter in the post from some clever lady who worked out i had a few hundred in the bank that were not mine from both the first cheque and second cheque and asked me kindly to pay it back. (damn!)

sooo....my question is after all that. if i had not of told them that i was down for two employments i never worked at and had been refunded too much tax that was not mine would i have got away with it??

Cook_County

Getting away with it is nothing to do with moneysaving, sorry. You did the right thing and told HMRC straight away that they had overpaid you. Keeping the money would have been common law cheat.