Help - Notice of 6 yr old Liability Order - Council Tax

thomase

Hi all
Not sure if this is the right place for this, but would love some advice.
My ex husband has received a letter addressed to both if us (including me in my old married name) from the council starting that in June 2009 a Liability Order was issued for council tax. Arears amount just over £1k, LO for nearly £1700!

The weird thing is, we were living in the property until the beginning of 2010, whereby we then moved to a new property within the same LA, where we lived until we subsequently split up later in the year. Following that we both continued to live in the LA at different addresses.

I know that we were not in arrears during this time. I have also checked the bank and can see payments to the LA from the Dec prior to the LO until after moving to the 3rd property within the LA when I changed banks. Can't see payments before as the transactions don't go back any further but the payments I can see are not adjusted to take any arrears into account and there are no gaps.

Also, at the time presumably if they had the LO in June, they wouldn't have hung about to get their money back and we were still there paying CT so it's not like they didn't know where we were.

It feels like a !!!!-up somewhere and I will be contacting to ask for proof of the LO and details of the arrears (there is no information given on the notice) and statement of accounts, etc. but I'm concerned that as an LA they will decide they don't have to prove !!!!!! all and we're stuck!

Has anyone had anything like this? Any advice?

booksurr

thomase wrote: »

Has anyone had anything like this? Any advice?

dispute it based on the facts of what their account records show obtained from the council v your bank statement details, anything else will just be hot air.

for a LO to be obtained the council simply has to show that it has written to your last known address. It does not have to prove you received any correspondence or that it did or did not know you lived at that address at the time.

you can't contest a LO on basis of not knowing about it, all you can contest is that it is incorrect in terms of its values, that will require your evidence against theirs. Someone clearly is wrong...

lincroft1710

As booksurr says, something is clearly wrong.

Councils usually automatically add arrears to current bills, so is there a possibility the arrears relate to a different property that you inhabited prior to the one you inhabited in 2009?

thomase

Thanks for the replies.
I am definitely going to dispute. We were at that property from 2006 and prior to that a few doors down.
I've checked the bank and looked back at records and between 2009 and 2011 we paid over £4k in council tax. We lived at 2 properties in that time but one for only 4 months and they're both Band E - £1425 a year. This includes overpayments for arrears (I had a bereavement which affected my business for a while) and subsequently the final part of the debt which was paid to Rundles. I spoke to them today and they confirmed it was cleared £1200 worth. It's just not possible that a further £1k has been missed. Not only that but as you've said - they previously added the arrears to the other account hence the overpayments and one or both of us have been on the electoral roll in their LA till now so it also makes no sense they're only just telling us!

I've requested details of the Order and their version of the accounts statement so I can verify with my own. Difficult part is my transactions only go up to Dec 2008 - before then it was with a different account I don't have access to.

I'd have had to have paid no council tax for years and presumably gone to jail for this to be true

lincroft1710

If you lived at 2 properties, and one for only 4 months, it seems to me that the council could have assumed you were there for the whole year - hence the Liability Order.