Tax Credit Award

KCJA1989

Hi all,

I recently (12/05/2021) made a claim for Universal Credit. Due to this, my Child Tax Credit claim ended. I have now been told that I have an overpayment of tax credits.

I have received two payments of tax credits this year: On 07/04/2021 (£477.98) and 05/05/2021 (£482.20) - these total to £960.18, this amount is correctly on the "payments already made" section of the correspondence. My question is, are these amounts not for the preceding four weeks rather than the following i.e. in advance? For example, the amount on 07/04/2021 - is that not the amount paid for the period up until that date i.e. from 10/03/2021 - 07/04/2021, or is it the amount in advance for the following four weeks? If it is the latter, then obviously the overpayment is correct and I will pay it in due course, I just wanted to make sure - I was always under the impression that the payment was in arrears and for the preceding four weeks.

Thanks.

calcotti

I'm really not sure about this. Tax Credits are actually an annual calculation with the annual amount paid in instalments. The payments are therefore not strictly attributable to a specific period of weeks. I am not clear whether the payment on 7th April was a final payment for 2020-21 or the first payment for 2021-22 (although clearly it was paid in the 2021-22 tax year).

May be worth looking at your 2020-21 Tax Credit award notice to see what your Tax Credit entitlement was and then totalling up all the payments you received to see if you can work out whether the amounts correspond.

When you claim UC Tax Credits do an in year finalisation so they have your apportion your entitlement to the relevant part of the year and take into account your income for that portion of the year also.

I don't like posting responses when I don't know the answer but I can see nobody else has responded.