Tax refund by payable order to bank, seriously messed up

Donnapem1987

Hi all, apologies in advance for the long post, I just want to see if anyone else has heard of this or had a tax refund this way and it actually go through?
Basically I had overpaid tax last year by over £600 and it was paid through PAYE. As soon as I got my last payslip of the year I could see it wasn't right so used the online tax refund claim form, so far all good.
Received a letter on 27th April saying yes I'd overpaid and they were sending a payable order to natwest bank within 14 days.
Cut a long story short no money has gone in. Numerous calls to hmrc and natwest later, it turns out Hmrc have sent a cheque not to my branch but a customer service office in Leicester. They say this is the address natwest have given them to send cheques to. Natwest telephone banking have no record of receiving any cheque, are not aware of this process being followed by hmrc and they managed to track down the direct contact phone number for this customer service centre for me. Called them and the person who answered put me over to his manager after I explained why I was calling as he said its nothing at all to do with what they do there. Manager comes on and I explain to him. He has never heard of this either and has said categorically that hmrc are lying as natwest would never give that address to send cheques to. Its not a secure procedure they would endorse for making payments for a start, that place is a small office of 20 or so people and they deal with mainly with complaints from corporate high end clients, they don't have any other departments or offices within that building, they do not have the facilities to process or pay in cheques as cheques need to be processed in a branch and are paid in over the counter or via the cheque deposit boxes, they only receive post as direct contact fao Mail for people working there from clients. If a cheque for anyone or anything to do with personal banking had been sent there it would be put as return to sender or forwarded onto the branch concerned if a sort code had been put on the cheque. He checked their postal records for the last few weeks and nothing of the sort had been received/forwarded/returned to sender. Hmrc are still saying that this is the addres natwest has given them, they send all cheques for natwest accounts here and they won't budge or acknowledge the possibility that they have made a mistake. I think an office of 20 people would have realised that natwest had given hmrc the wrong address if thousands of cheques had descended!
Worst thing is during the filling out of the claim form online they offered me payment by cheque or direct payment into my bank, I chose direct payment into my bank, I filled in all my details including my branch address under the impression it would be a transfer into my account. But no according to hmrc direct payment means send a cheque to your bank instead of you. Who would ever want to do this? And why are they using terms that everyone but them takes to mean a bacs transfer to describe this daft process?
We are due to get married next Friday and when the letter came saying we'd have this refund within 14 days we booked a mini-moon which we didn't think we'd get to do. We were due to pay it on Monday and have had to cancel
Sorry for the rant but I'm just all worked up after being passed from pillar to post the last week and being lied to.
Hmrc are now in the process of cancelling the cheque and reissuing one to come direct to me, apparently this will take them 10 weeks and their response is if I'm not happy write a letter but it's there procedure so they've done nothing wrong. Absolute joke!!!!

Has anyone else ever heard of this? If so has anyone with a natwest account ever had their refund go in to their account via this process?
Surely they can't be routinely doing this with no one flagging it up as being a major mess up
or am I just being lied to about that too?
Thanks in advance of any replies

Pennywise

Sounds like the person you spoke to at HMRC hasn't a clue. As far as I know, they don't send cheques to banks. Cheques are sent to the taxpayer's home address or direct bank transfers are done by BACS. You need to phone HMRC again and try to get it escalated as it just doesn't sound right at HMRC's end. No wonder the bank can't help - they seem to be the ones telling you the right story.

dori2o

Pennywise wrote: »

Sounds like the person you spoke to at HMRC hasn't a clue. As far as I know, they don't send cheques to banks. Cheques are sent to the taxpayer's home address or direct bank transfers are done by BACS. You need to phone HMRC again and try to get it escalated as it just doesn't sound right at HMRC's end. No wonder the bank can't help - they seem to be the ones telling you the right story.

BACS repayments are only issued for SA repayments.

For PAYE repayments the tapayer can request that the repayment is issued direct to the bank. When this is done the taxpayer provides the sort code and account number, but as PAYE does not have the provision to pay via BACS, then a payable order (Cheque) is issued to the bank.

Clearly the person at Natwest is the one who doesn't have a clue.

For the past 18 months or so, where the customer has indicated that they want their PAYE repayment sending to their bank, the cheque is issued to the banks processiog centre. This is the same for all the major banks.

If HMRC were not supposed to use that address then exactly where did they obtain it from?

It is very rare that local branches now cash chaque payments. The reason why banks still have a 10 day waiting period on cheques is that they are sent to their processing centres to be cashed.

In discussions with the banks it was agreed that HMRC should cut out the process of sending payments to local brances and send them direct to the sort centres/ processing centres.

Clearly the so called 'manager' at Natwest isn't high enough up the food chain to understand the business agreements between his employer and HMRC.

The informtion given to the OP from the HMRC adviser is correct. All repayments from PAYE where the taxpayer requests payment to their bank are done by way of a cheque payment to the taxpayers bank, sent to the processing/sort centre address provided to HMRC by the bank themselves.

These addresses are contained within a database which the adviser uses to issue the payment, the correct address to send the payments to. This is done manually.

For smaller banks who have not agreed to take part in the scheme they generally only have a single correspondence address anyway (especially the internet based banks), or, they do cash cheques/payable orders at local branches.

If I was a customer of Natwest I'd be concerned that the 'Manager' was calling people liars when they themselves clearly don't have a clue what they are talking about.

Donnapem1987

Hi there and thanks for your post, it seems you know more about how this is supposed to work than the people I've spoke to at hmrc and natwest put together.
Problem is they didn't send it to a processing centre. They sent it to a corporate client complaints office. It was the manager of that office I spoke with, no other departments or offices for natwest are at that address.
Bear in mind I finally got the answer of where this cheque was sent after 4 calls to hmrc totalling 1 and half hours. The first person said it's probably a cheque that's been sent to your bank branch or a cheque that's been sent to you or it might be a bank payment, when I questioned 'probably' she said yea, it could be any, I can't see which they've done but you will have to wait three weeks for any of those though. When asked why the letter said two, she said I don't know cause it should say three really.
The next few people were positive it was sent to the branch and I should check with them.
Eventually on the 4th call I got given the full address of where they actually sent it.
On the 5th call they insisted it was correct even though I'd told them I have spoken with this office directly and they wouldn't listen.
I have been called back this evening by a supervisor at hmrc, turns out they have made an error in that the cheque was sent to this place but it's not the address natwest have given them for processing cheques. They do not know why this address was used or where they got it from as it is not an address they were given. She said there is going to be an internal investigation as to how this happened. She agreed with me that the claim form should be clearer about the process as it does use terms people assume is a direct bank transfer payment and it's not the first time this has been confused.

Looks like the manager in the natwest corporate client complaints office was right to call them liars after all.

She's arranged for my replacement cheque to be expedited, so it'll be with me in 5 weeks instead of 10. How kind of them!

dori2o

Donnapem1987 wrote: »

Hi there and thanks for your post, it seems you know more about how this is supposed to work than the people I've spoke to at hmrc and natwest put together.
Problem is they didn't send it to a processing centre. They sent it to a corporate client complaints office. It was the manager of that office I spoke with, no other departments or offices for natwest are at that address.
Bear in mind I finally got the answer of where this cheque was sent after 4 calls to hmrc totalling 1 and half hours. The first person said it's probably a cheque that's been sent to your bank branch or a cheque that's been sent to you or it might be a bank payment, when I questioned 'probably' she said yea, it could be any, I can't see which they've done but you will have to wait three weeks for any of those though. When asked why the letter said two, she said I don't know cause it should say three really.
The next few people were positive it was sent to the branch and I should check with them.
Eventually on the 4th call I got given the full address of where they actually sent it.
On the 5th call they insisted it was correct even though I'd told them I have spoken with this office directly and they wouldn't listen.
I have been called back this evening by a supervisor at hmrc, turns out they have made an error in that the cheque was sent to this place but it's not the address natwest have given them for processing cheques. They do not know why this address was used or where they got it from as it is not an address they were given. She said there is going to be an internal investigation as to how this happened. She agreed with me that the claim form should be clearer about the process as it does use terms people assume is a direct bank transfer payment and it's not the first time this has been confused.

Looks like the manager in the natwest corporate client complaints office was right to call them liars after all.

She's arranged for my replacement cheque to be expedited, so it'll be with me in 5 weeks instead of 10. How kind of them!

The timescale for replacement cheques is UPTO 6 weeks, not 10.

The key word here is UPTO.

The actualamountof time taken depends on external pressures, i.e. banking. HMRC need information from 3rd parties prior to being able to cancel and re-issue repayments.

If all is well then you should have your repayment well before the 6 week timescale passes.

Bodymass

Same thing has just happened to me.

I've no idea why they even bother asking for bank account details, when it gives the impression that they'll be paying the refund directly into your account. In actual fact they do state they'll be paying into you bank, when that obviously isn't the case. It's a complete and utter joke.

I'm due to travel to Poland in a couple of week's time so there's now no chance of receiving the money before I go and whilst it's not a massive amount (only £1120), it would still have been nice to have.

Donnalou99

Hi, I've just had the same happen to me, have you received your money yet?