tax credit overpayments new report published

ANGELB

Hi Mom01 Tax Credits overpaid me by £4200! They kept 'forgetting' to put my self employed income on or put that on and forgot to put my employed income on etc etc. I contacted them everytime and had various excuses, system down, ring back so on and so on. Then they disputed my claims. Luckily I always write everything down, name, date and time and then re write it out after so that it would make sense and still be fresh in my memory. You can also request a cd of all your telephone calls you have made to them. They will send it to you and you can confirm what you have said. although in my case they only recorded 9 out of the 11 conversations but they made the mistake of writing this down! So 2 of the conversations lasting several minutes were not 'burned' on the cd. I transcribed this cd painstakingly for 4 hours 'ad verbatim' ! My case has been going on since 2005. I had to tell them to stop paying me the £10.50 per week so as not to increase the debt too. My daughter is now in her final year at college and I have had nothing as my tax credit has been used to reduce the debt. However, there will still be at least £2600 balance. I also wrote to my MP. He has been excellent and his secretary a councillor said that the CD made 'interesting' listening. The tax credit cretins then sent me a hardship claim form in Oct 08 which I completed and then asked me to ring them to discuss payments. I've been advised to re-mortgage my house! Do they not listen to the news????? They have just replied via the Adjudicator's office to say that yes they were at fault by miscalculating and failing to put the correct information but that I was also at fault at not notifiying them HELLO, HELLO you tax credit morons, I have the CD, the paper work and a full lever arch file dossier to back me up. Oh and they offered to 'pay' me £150 for the upset caused and telephone calls made! What do you make of that!??

margh_2

I had a letter about 3 year ago asking me to pay back 468.87 from about 3 year previously. I said you cant just ask for that after 3 year. They wouldnt accept weekly payments as they said I was already paying some back in this way and was only allowed to do it once. Anyway I heard no more and now I have 2 letters from a debt recovery firm asking me for the money. Apparantly it's tax credits they say I was overpaid about 6 years ago. I dont have it and they would let me repay it in installments. I dont agree with paying it anyway as Ive heard of loads being written off. What can I do?

sassybooboos

Having been overpaid by 800 i phoned to sort out a payment plan. and the jumped up git on the other end said well if i wanted to i could take a quarter of whatever money you have coming in so i think im being fair letting you pay it back at £23 per month.

As im only getting £200 per month with 1 child i find that very unfair but their attitude seems to be tough.

whitevanwoman

Go to www.taxcc.org - it's a website for people who have got tax credit overpayment problems - have a good look round the site and look at the "How to dispute" section, go to the library page and download the COP 26 which sets out their guidelines & rules etc. Download the Dispute form TC846 and send it in to the Tax Credit office. Then put in a request for all info held on you (SARN request) so that you can see whether or not the "overpayment" is genuine or whether it has occured due to mistakes by Tax Credits staff.

Go to the TaxCC forum and copy and paste your post from this thread into the new members thread and hopefully someone will give you some advice and support.

From now on, make sure that you keep detailed records of all contact with the Tax Credit office or Debt Recovery dept - date, time of call, name of person you spoke to etc, and if you send them anything make sure it goes recorded delivery.

There are rules around recovering repayments from people in financial hardship but they don't tell you this and they don't like it when people remind them of these rules. COP 26 should give you more info about this.

DON'T AGREE TO REPAY A PENNY until you have exhausted all the dispute and appeal options and even then, only if you do feel that it is a genuine overpayment and not the result of staff error or a faulty IT system. Once you have submitted a dispute form, recovery of overpayments should be suspended although often HMRC don't seem to be able to pass this info on to the debt recovery dept so you might have to send the debt recovery dept a copy of your dispute form to prove that you are in dispute. Keep copies of everything too.

Hope this helps - do have a look at www.taxcc.org - it's helped me with my overpayment problems.

dianab_3

dianab wrote: »

Very helpful. Thanks
Just wears one down though.
No doubt they'll be back next year for more again!

Re my £5,500 they say I owe.

I appealed and now have late apology letter, saying that I did not check the form they sent me with my details on and advise them of my change of income, so ... they made no mistake, I did;
even though I wrote and told them of my circumstances at the beginning of the year.
I need to find time to check all this, but yes, it makes you sick, especially if you save to pay the taxman each half year.
God knows how I get sort of money: I suppose i will end up asking to pay £50 a week for over 5 years, as I am due to retire in November.

whitevanwoman

dianab wrote: »

Re my £5,500 they say I owe.

I appealed and now have late apology letter, saying that I did not check the form they sent me with my details on and advise them of my change of income, so ... they made no mistake, I did;
even though I wrote and told them of my circumstances at the beginning of the year.
I need to find time to check all this, but yes, it makes you sick, especially if you save to pay the taxman each half year.
God knows how I get sort of money: I suppose i will end up asking to pay £50 a week for over 5 years, as I am due to retire in November.

Sorry you are still having to go through all this but if you have proof of sending them a letter advising them of the change of circs, submit another dispute form attaching a copy of the letter as new evidence. If you have sent off a SAR request, you should receive copies of all correspondence and screen shots which will prove if/when you informed them.

Sadly even having proof doesn't mean that they will accept it as proof, but if you genuinely feel that this overpayment was as a result of their error, keep fighting it. They will try to wriggle out of accepting responsiblilty every which way possible (the govt coffers are so empty that they are desperate to get more money out of us than ever, even by illegal and immoral means), even though you can prove they were responsible for their overpayment and you met your responsibilities as a claimant (as laid out in the COP 26 guidelines). But it is possible to fight and win. It's just soul-destroying and very very hard work.

If you haven't yet been to the Tax Credit Casualties forum and posted there, I really do urge you to do so - there are regular forum members who know much more than I do about the details and pitfalls of disputes and appeals and can give you more helpful advice than I can.

andybean

Hi all
I thought i would add my tale of tax credit woe, the latest happening only this morning.
My schedule arrived,dated the 25th of Feb, stating if i didnt get back to them confirming my details by the 5th of April id be overpaied by £922.

It arrived today!!! approx 7 weeks late? and both my husbands and mine on the same day?

Iv phoned up ,complained, asked for an official complaint letter, but its their word against mine!
Im catching up with the postman on tue to ask what the bar code stuck on the front of the letter means and if this can give any delivery info i can use offically to find out delivery dates etc.
I wont even go into the other 2 overpayment charges i have , 1 dropped, 1 hopefully to be dropped soon if the person actually reads and looks at the evidence ive sent!
Madness, it is frightening the amount of people that are going through this,decent good people who want a bit of help for once.
The stress and worry of all this ontop of general money worries is a nightmare.
Good luck anyone in the same boat!

homealone_2

i have been disputing a £8900 overpayment from 03/04 for years. they didnt even tell me i was overpaid till dec 05. they say they did not receive my notification of marriage in 2003. as its a their word against mine i continually had my disputes refused. this happened whilst ill in hospial and being in hospital for weeks ata time when i had no access to banks statements or award notices and even if i did i was usually high on morphine so would have made no sense of it.
since then i informed them of my husband walking out nov 08 and they then tell me i was overpaid every other year too due to ex doing overtime so end of year earnings always higher than anticiapated this results in another £7500 overpayment. however while trying to disput this i had set up £30 a month payments as initial amount to be reviewd for the £8900, when going through their website i found an intersting statement saying if i had been ill and in hospital and not aware of overpayments bla bla bla they would wipe out overpayment. i wrote to tell them so many times about illnes at time but they never commented on it at time always saying would not disput unless i had new evidence so i have written to them pointing all this out and now wait with baited breath. it seems to me i have a really goof case for them to argue but cant really see them writing off £8900 somehow. this hospital thing was never on any of their reasons for overturning so i will have to wait. for time being am sitting on £7500 overpayment as i dont want to cloud the issue with two seperate disputes......do you think i have a chance of having even a part of it written off or has anyone ever had any money written off due to these circumstances???

savvy

Hi homealone, I haven't heard of anyone with a case like yours, beggars belief eh! :rolleyes: If I was you I'd definately get on the www.taxcc.org site (done in big for all to spot)..............I know me and whitevanwoman keep banging on about the site but it really really really really IS the best place to go, it's FREE, it's sympathetic, it's helpful!!!

Without the hardworking volunteers at https://www.taxcc.org I would've had a break down about it all by now, and wouldn't be in the strong powerful position I am in now. HMRC are trying to lie about a phone call I made to them and worm their way out of THEIR mistake.................now I trusted them and wouldn't have known how to go about fighting for my innocence without the guidance and support of the Tax Credit Casualties site EVERYBODY HERE SHOULD GO THERE, honestly nobody here can help any of you like they can there, all we can give here is a bit of sympathy and bleat on about our own experiences, but the cases are very individual and need more specialist help

whitevanwoman

Am just about to tackle my 4th overpayment in 4 years of claiming with the help of www.taxcc.org - it arose because they did not deduct an emergency manual payment from the 3 months worth of backpayment they owed me whilst they took 3 months to incorrectly terminate my claim, omit to tell me that it had been terminated and that I would need to start a new claim and then they lost that new claim. I even got an apology and compensation for the delay and stress at the time when it was sorted - now it seems they sorted it wrong. How a govt agency can repeatedly demonstrate such incompetetance and negligence and continue to get away with it just beggars belief.

There has been a new development - in a statement from the Financial Secretary to the Treasury Steven Timm’s MP
“If .... Constituents have informed the tax credit office of errors on the award notice and if those errors have led to an overpayment, that overpayment is not recoverable. If you would like to draw my attention to any examples of that kind, that would be the outcome”

Also in a recent ITV "Tonight" programme, David Hartnett, the head of tax for HMRC said that that if anyone did think they had been treated unfairly by HMRC they could write to him and he would look into it. Here's a link to the programme http://www.itv.com/News/tonight/episodes/Takingonthetaxman/default.html

I will therefore be copying my latest dispute and complaint to both Stephen Timms and David Hartnett aswell as to my MP.

I suggest that you all do the same and make sure that the people at the top know what is really going on and lets see if they are as good as their word. Taxcc is currently putting together a list of people who feel that according to Stephen Timms, their OP should be written off so go to www.taxcc.org and check the latest news and forum and get your names on the list.