HMRC Paid tax rebate into someone else's bank account

spadoosh

The accountant cant do that much (short of lending you the money).

If a payment is made in error the sender needs to contact their bank to inform them of the mistake.

The senders bank then contacts the wrong receivers bank withing 2 days to raise the issue on the account. The bank of the wrong receiver then informs the receiver they believe the payment was made in error. If the receiver agrees the payment is refunded within 21 days iirc. If the receiver disputes it you have to go about building a case up.

If its your accountant thats made the mistake i imagine HMRC will only do what they have to (as above). If it was there mistake i would expect them to make the payment to you asap and deal with sorting out their mistake and recovering the money in their own time.

In theory it should be resolved in 3 weeks unless the person who receives the money disputes it.

CharlieCCCC

Ok thank you,

Surely the bank will see that the payment has my name addressed on it and the receiver won't have a leg to stand on if he/she disputes it?

dggar

As it is the school holidays the accountant probably has some one in doing work experience. This is possibly the reason for the error.

jonesMUFCforever

CharlieCCCC wrote: »

Ok thank you,

Surely the bank will see that the payment has my name addressed on it and the receiver won't have a leg to stand on if he/she disputes it?

Electronic credits only have a sort code and account number - your name will not appear on it.

System

PeacefulWaters wrote: »

While there are, I believe, certain numbers excluded, running the full range of:

00000000
00000001
00000002
To
99999999

Has exactly 100,000,000 different numbers in the complete sequence.

As you probably know, most banks only issue certain account numbers (against certain sort codes) for error checking purposes.

Also, other factors such as branch mergers can influence if an account/sort code is actually used.

Kim_13

Don't payments from HMRC have the receiver's NI number as part of the payment reference? OP could prove his/her NI number to prove that the credit is theirs if so.

Geoff1963

I've often thought that there must be a way to generate some kind of check code - taking the 12 digits and producing say three or four letters which are the same every time the account number and sort code are entered into a computer, and that the letters wouldn't match if any of the digits were incorrect.

If every valid number was divisible by 7, it would pick up 6 in 7 mistakes. Let's make them divisible by 429, then we get a very healthy accuracy.
Same for phone numbers.

amanda40

Kim_13 wrote: »

Don't payments from HMRC have the receiver's NI number as part of the payment reference? OP could prove his/her NI number to prove that the credit is theirs if so.

Not any more, even if you receive a refund through for yourself the number is all but blanked out ,it just shows a couple of the numbers

Chino

Kim_13 wrote: »

Don't payments from HMRC have the receiver's NI number as part of the payment reference?

In my experience the first part of the payment reference for a tax refund from HMRC is the payee's Unique Taxpayer Reference.