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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
 Posted - 17/07/2008 : 20:03:01
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OK some of you may remember me from my original thread here. I have finally got my dispute back (8 months after submitting it). TCO still say I have to repay the money. Now this time TCO have actually admitted it was their error that caused the claim to go into payment, they also admit that they should have sent out a new renewal form which I would have had to sign and return to continue receiving WTC, they didn't send it so I didn't receive it or sign it. I also noticed they applied the revised COP26 even though this is an old dispute, it had been ongoing since Feb 06 and this current dispute was submitted in Nov 07 so IMO the old COP26 should have applied. To make this easier to understand I will put the relevant points from my rejection letter in a fresh post below. Please feel free to submit your opinions and comments as how best to fight my appeal.
So to sum up. I lose my dispute because I failed to meet my responsibilities as set out in the revised COP26, even though they failed to meet their responsibilities, so they get off scott free and I get to pay £2000 that I never received in the first place. Where's the justice there then.
Regards,
Nigel
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Edited by - nigel on 17/07/2008 21:25:07 |
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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
Posted - 17/07/2008 : 20:35:06
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quote:
Your initial claim for WTC resulted in zero entitlement due to your income being above the threshold. Your claim was automatically renewed as it had zero entitlement. We incorrectly applied JSA(IB) to your claim, this should have generated a new renewal form which you would have to sign and return to continue receiving WTC. This does not appear to have happened and we failed to meet our responsibilities under COP26
The claim was auto renewed which explains why they are saying a claim was in effect even though I never renewed in writing. The incorrect JSA(IB) marker was applied after I separated from my then wife. I'm surprised they actually accept responsibility anything.
quote:
When the JSA(IB) was entered an award notice was issued to both you and your partner at the address we held for you at that time. We would have expected your partner to inform us that you had separated. It is also your responsibility to inform us of change of address
I did not inform them of a change of circumstance as I was completely unaware of any ongoing WTC claim. It was reasonable to believe my claim ended when I was awarded zero entitlement.
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For us to write off an overpayment you must show you met all of your responsibilities in COP26
- provide us with up to date information when you made or renewed your claim
- checked all the personal details on your award notice were correct and told us straight away if they were incorrect
- told us promptly about any change of circumstances throughout the year
- checked the payments you were receiving were correct
I only ever submitted one claim and at that time the details were correct, if I had received an award notice for the following year the details would have still been correct as had not yet separated. I would not have received any award notices after that as I was not at the address they went to. I didn't notify of a change of circumstances as I didn't know I had a current claim, and on the final point I couldn't check the payments because a) I wasn't aware of any payments and b) the payments were made to a bank account I had no access to at the time the payments were made (it was an old joint bank account).
They believe I met my responsibilities.
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I have looked at whether we should ask you to repay a different amount than your ex partner because the payments have been payed into an account that was no longer joint. As no payments were made after we were informed of your separation both you and your ex partner remain liable for the full amount.
The payments occurred from sept 04 to oct 05, they were only informed of our separation in late oct 05 when the payments came to light. I separated from my partner in late april 04. The TCO error occurred after my separation and my presence on the joint account was removed before any payment was made.
On a final note I quoted a case from the adjudicators office. It was similar in style to my own and the only reply I got regarding this was " I am unable to comment as I am unaware of the details of the case" and pointed me to the adjudicators office. I am only going there as a last resort as if I lose thats it case closed
Regards,
Nigel |
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Alan the Geordie
Da Purple one
2787 Posts |
Posted - 17/07/2008 : 23:05:29
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Hi Nigel
I think I'd be taking this to my MP and telling him that it's going to the press too and asking him if he'd like to comment in the press.
Then I would take it to the press & tell them that you've seen you MP about it and maybe they'd like to contact him for his views, then I'd sit back & watch.
Maybe I's also write to our unelected dictator Gordon Brown who has said that he will listen. Give him about 14 days to reply and when he doesn't go to the press with that too. Something along the lines of "Gordon said he'd start listening but ..."
You catch my drift?
Nigel my Friend; there are correct procedures to follow in these situations and if they work that's fine, but I'm not too sure how often that is. Then there are what I call "alternative" methods and which I used to win my case, get £100 compensation & 3 leters of apology - 2 from Dawn Primarolo & 1 from Jane Kennedy - all of which are framed & hanging on my netty wall.
You takes your choice ...
"Dave Anderson (Labour) MP for Blaydon for Prime Minister!!" |
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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
Posted - 17/07/2008 : 23:15:46
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Thanks for the advice Alan, my only problem is that I am publicity shy. I would take it to the press in a shot but I just don't fancy being splashed over the papers, though I admit it might come to that. I like the letter to PM idea though. I am actually getting back on to my MP, I have been in contact previously he did some help then, just not enough at that time. Problem is he will be on summer recess soon so will be disappearing on holiday for a while.
Regards,
Nigel |
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Willow
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
United Kingdom
56 Posts |
Posted - 18/07/2008 : 11:40:26
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Hi Nigel - I recently went to the local press and they ran a story on the front page where we were not named. I had also been in touch with my MP and once I emailed him to say they were running a story, he rang the press office and gave some quotes. I then wrote and called TCO/Gordon Brown/Jane Kennedy/Alistair Darling and let them all know that their mistake was being picked up by the press. Things got sorted rather quickly after that. Although my case may well have been resolved without this action, by my reckoning there was still a long way to go without it as calls to each of the various offices concerned showed that the un-joined-up TC system was not sharing information - my appeal was noted on one system, but not on another - my complaints noted on another systems, but not shared elsewhere etc.
A follow up story last week still remained anonymous - the reporter asked if we'd like a photo done but I explained again that my partner was not comfortable with everyone knowing our business, and that was respected. I shied away from the press angle until the local paper ran a story about another man and his family hit with an overpayment demand. To my knowledge this chap hasn't contacted his MP, who therefore has not applied any pressure on his behalf and his case is still unresolved..... I say go the whole hog, and ask for anonymity in the press if that makes it easier. Good luck.
BTW - no reply as yet from old Listenin' Gordy......apology from Jane Kennedy.....compensation offered and not yet received..... |
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Alan the Geordie
Da Purple one
2787 Posts |
Posted - 18/07/2008 : 17:16:34
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Thanks Willow for confirming what I've believed for a long time now.
"Dave Anderson (Labour) MP for Blaydon for Prime Minister!!" |
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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
Posted - 18/07/2008 : 20:44:00
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Thanks also from me Willow. Alan who are the best people to go for, the nationals or the locals. I'll try the anonymity angle. Looks like I've got my work cut out this weekend, in between work commitments.
Regards,
Nigel |
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Alan the Geordie
Da Purple one
2787 Posts |
Posted - 18/07/2008 : 22:07:34
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Hi Nigel
I think Willow went to her local paper and I think this is what I would have done too.
I may be a bit cynical here, but I think the nationals may not be so "free" to report on some things as they should be - if you catch my drift. 
Also, I think that in your local paper you're more of a big fish in a small pond - I'm not suggesting that there's anything at all "fishy" about willow BTW, but let's not carp on that one! 
Make sure that you make a big thing about how "Oor Gordon" made a promise to listen and how it would appear that he's broken it already!! 
"Dave Anderson (Labour) MP for Blaydon for Prime Minister!!" |
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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
Posted - 18/07/2008 : 22:23:33
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My local rag, discounting the very local weekly "gossipmongerer" is the York Press and they have highlighted Tax Credits issues before, so when I have got my MP on board, I just got an email today from his office saying they are away until 27th July, I will try and get the press interested. In the meantime I will get back to letter writing to TCO. BTW I called the TCO Belfast office this morning to discuss the matter, I think I woke up the person who answered, she wasn't very helpful, she just let me rant on and quote TCO rules to her. She will get a manager to call me Monday, I won't hold my breath.
Regards,
Nigel |
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TCC Webmaster
Da Purple one
Virgin Islands (United Kingdom)
129 Posts |
Posted - 19/07/2008 : 00:59:22
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Hi Nigel,
With regard to your call to TCO Belfast, no, don't hold your breath ... but log the time and date of the call, who you spoke to and a quick resume of the conversation. For the record...
Something that never really seems to come out is that lots and lots of people are actually trying to sort out their overpayments, yet HMRC's main tactic is simply to not respond, hoping we will give in. Stay silent and maybe we will go away.
They are the most incompetent organisation that I, and many thousands of others, have ever had to try and deal with.
It is a national disgrace that this is what HMRC have become - what the Government have turned them into. The huge bonuses recently awarded simply reinforce the fact that this is by design - this is what our 'listening' Government want.
Tell it as it is - there is absolutely no shame in being mugged nowdays! |
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Ali M-W
Da Tech(y ones)
3296 Posts |
Posted - 19/07/2008 : 07:31:19
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Nigel, when you get the attention of your local newspaper, please do try to get them to mention 'Tax Credit Casualties', and quote the website www.taxCC.org . The local papers seem able to do this more readily than the nationals, and the beauty of this is that firstly you then reach more people (every time we have ever had anything in a paper or magazine bearing either our name or website details we always end up with a surge in membership, and there is always someone at their wits' end saying, 'thank goodness I found you when I did'), and it also signals that you're not some isolated guy with a tax credit problem amongst millions of happy bunnies, but actually there are thousands and thousands of us already 'in the fold'. This may also prove a spur to local politicians who may be - if they are New Labour and not of the Jon Cruddas/Dave Anderson ilk (who seem to have retained some traditional Labour values and ethics) - shaken out of their complacency and made aware of the fact that large numbers of their constituents are suffering for no good reason and through no fault or deficit of their own.
I agree with our Webmaster - HMRC is a complete shambles. We could almost forgive complete incompetence if the organisation had at its core a few (more) people prepared to listen and put things right, who owned up to mistakes and shortcomings and diligently set about putting them right, not in an adversarial 'well, you are a powerless little minion and we are an almighty, omnipotent organisation so therefore we are right and you must be wrong' sort of way, but with some empathy and awareness that they are supposed to be the 'experts', not us! But they don't do this. For one thing, it seems that they have separated out their debt recovery section from the rest of their outfit, so that one side doesn't communicate with the other, possibly quite deliberately in a drive to get money back. Hence it is the norm for claimants to receive hair-raising, threatening and toxic letters from the debt recovery unit at the same time as they are battling to twease an answer out of the operational side. Both will work at completely different speeds, so that - if left unchecked and not stopped by stern letters marked 'complaint' in bold red letters three inches high sent by recorded delivery, or by letters from a sympathetic MP - the debt recovery section will have court threats sent, a Certificate of Debt written out, and the bailiffs on your doorstep in ten nanoseconds, whilst you can be waiting three months for the other side to print you off a standard, 'it's your fault so pay up' letter which, if you are incredibly lucky, might make a half-hearted attempt at replying to one of the ten points on your original letter.
Not only that, but HMRC can't deal with people as real people, and their still-flawed computer system must operate on some kind of 'pick list' for narrative recorded, which doesn't allow for common reasons why a claim might change, so that the HMRC employee just has to put down some phrase which doesn't properly describe the circumstances but might just about do the job. Hence, in 2005, when I fulfilled my obligations under the newly-enforced Civil Partnership Act on the earliest possible date to tell HMRC that I had a same-sex partner, HMRC had no way of logging on my records 'sole claimant becomes joint', but had to apparently describe the ending of my sole claim and start of our joint one as a 'household breakdown', which was then plastered all over my records. When this came to light later and I complained about this, considering it deeply insulting and inaccurate to have my records inaccurately indicating a relationship breakdown which never happened, along with several tactless, insensitive and unprofessional references to my partner as 'he' and 'him' - making assumptions which just a little care and attention to detail would have avoided - I was told that they would be changing this terminology. Months and months down the line, a friend was told by HMRC that he and his wife had split up, because they had again used this defective description for a completely different situation. Now, it's one thing to record things bizarrely yet to somehow set up a correcting system which notes somewhere that this isn't actually the true reason but the nearest, best-fit way round a problem, but it's quite another to just let this wrong bit of information sit there unqualified on the file for some future worker to retrieve as fact, and then regurgitate to the claimant and their representatives as though it were completely true. Thus my friend had been told he was overpaid because he and his wife had split up! The poor claimant then has a devil of a job persuading HMRC that this is a foolish pick-list computer entry and has absolutely no basis in fact! Anything on HMRC's computer seems to write off what may actually be happening in the claimant's life, and become some kind of alternative reality to HMRC!
Thus HMRC - who went through a stage of zeroing my salary behind the scenes at least three times for reasons they have never been able to explain to the Adjudicator, but actually never needed to, because the Adjudicator just seemed to accept that as quite okay - were able to tell my MP that my overpayment arose because my salary one year for a 37 hour week was apparently £42,000-odd, but the following year for the same hours it was zero! It seems HMRC just regurgitate whatever is sitting on their computer screen as though it is completely true and beyond all doubt. This is just one aspect of the lumbering Frankinstein's monster that is HMRC. If they were just a badly-run, inefficient organisation whose work we had to continually audit ourselves, that would almost be tolerable, but when you couple that with the immense power HMRC has to enforce its will upon you, and the means it has at its disposal to recover money, regardless of whether it is owed or not - well that suddenly becomes terrifying.
HMRC seems to habe a policy of 'snatch or bully back now, check later', and in my own sister's case, it took just two letters to get HMRC to admit that that is effectively what they had done. From screaming at my poor sister for £1500 back immediately, or else they would do this, and they would do that, and they would take her to court and force her to repay, they then had to admit that they had mistakenly registered a debt of £1300 against her name which should never have been there. My sister is a lovely person who likes to do right by people and there isn't a bad bone in her body, and I know that had this not happened she would have ended up in complete poverty trying to pay back money she never even owed in the first place, had the Tax Credit Casualties not been able to intervene.
HMRC is a Kafkaesque, Orwellian institution which has become a law unto itself. And the terrifying thing is that they want ever more power. In a minute I will post a link to an article which Ken Frost's 'HMRConline' site has highlighted. WE MUST OPPOSE THE GIVING OF EVER-MORE POWERS TO BUNGLING, BUREAUCRATIC AND HEARTLESS HMRC!!!
It's here: http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=186130
Trinity: The answer is out there… and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.
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Edited by - Ali M-W on 19/07/2008 07:38:21 |
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Ali M-W
Da Tech(y ones)
3296 Posts |
Posted - 19/07/2008 : 07:51:18
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It's a long, thorough but thought-provoking article, but here's just a brief intro to whet your appetite:
In the process of aligning its own rights and powers, following the merger between the two departments of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is slowly and steadily cutting down rights which we might quite reasonably expect as individuals.
The department has been busy during the last three years ticking off the boxes in its own redesign project. When it comes to new powers HMRC appears to be getting exactly what it wants; in fact almost the entire contents of its wish list are all being put into statute. These also include detailing the actual percentage penalties HMRC can levy – “that’s 30% mate, as approved by parliament,” to the virtually unfettered right to visit your premises wherever “it thinks” it needs to.
Now, HMRC needed a revamp, and the brief was to make it radical after all. It is one thing though giving HMRC greater powers than the police, but the rights of the taxpayer should not be neglected. The 2008 Finance Bill is about to receive Royal Assent and then HMRC’s new powers kick in. These fundamental reforms affect all taxpayers and benefits claimants, but the striking things is that every new power does not automatically have a corresponding safeguard.
We are told that HMRC’s powers are aligned across the taxes “for clarity” and to make things easier for customers(!), but our rights are not being correspondingly updated.
So we have:
No automatic right of appeal against every new power,
no right to the independent scrutiny of a tribunal and
no automatic right to compensation if it all goes wrong.
Unless we do something fast, our rights will be reliant on the old fashioned notion of a “gentleman’s agreement.”
I cannot emphasise enough the extent of the problem, our fundamental and basic rights as citizens within the tax system of this "fair and sceptred isle" depend on HMRC following its own non-statutory guidance. Guidance that is not embedded in the law, guidance that is not recongnisable or enforceable by any court in the land, and guidance that is not set by an independent body or subject to sanction by parliament.
I have just come back from the ICAEW and I can tell you that its tax faculty is more than “concerned”, as its current chair, Paul Aplin puts it, he is “Worried, very worried.” .........
http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=186130
Do we want to allow HMRC to have even more powers than they already have?
Just to let you know that the Tax Credit Casualties have top-class lawyers working on a lawsuit for us at this moment - pro bono - which to those unfamiliar with this term means without our having to pay for it! But there is a downside. To get HMRC to court, we have to have a reserve fund in the event that we lose, and HMRC pursue their perogative in that eventuality to have us pay costs - which we think they would avail themselves of without any compunction. So we need some serious money. Whether this comes in a lovely big chunk from some generous philanthropist or is given pound by pound by individual members, both would be remarkable and hugely welcome. The founding and most active/visible members have pretty much self-funded the whole outfit and campaign on shirtbuttons to date, but unless our Webmaster scoops the Lottery jackpot, we can't self-fund this! So if you want to fight back against the omnipotent HMRC, please go to www.taxCC.org and click on the 'Donate' button on the left hand side. We understand our members are casualties of a system which commonly leaves us poorer than it found us, but we are not seeking huge sums from poor people - just what you can afford. So please help us to help you!
I know I've gone off-topic here, but this links in to individual disputes because what we are trying to do is to end the misery of tens of thousands of people having to have their lives consumed in fighting their own individual cases, and get to a situation where Gordon Brown will write a Northern Rock style cheque to write off every single non-fraudulent overpayment and let us all have our lives back again.
There may even be a few votes riding on this one, Gordon!
Trinity: The answer is out there… and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.
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nigel
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
54 Posts |
Posted - 22/07/2008 : 23:06:53
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Guess what! the manager from TCO Belfast never called, now there's a surprise. Never mind it's duly noted and will be the subject of a complaint letter.
Regards,
Nigel |
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franners
Rank; Hector Tax Inspector
United Kingdom
40 Posts |
Posted - 29/07/2008 : 18:15:34
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| I find the writing of a complaint letter very therapeutic! I'd prefer it if I didn't have to but theres something satisfying about pointing out what an incompetent bunch they are and writing COMPLAINT in red pen on the envelope!! |
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Robert
Da Purple one
United Kingdom
827 Posts |
Posted - 29/07/2008 : 18:26:52
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Red pen...i print off sheets with Richard Summergills name on, and in very large print,, complaint at the top, in red.
The truth is out there.. GO get it......Non Illigitamus Carborundum
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Alan the Geordie
Da Purple one
2787 Posts |
Posted - 29/07/2008 : 22:28:17
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Nice to see me Bairns are finally getting the hang of The Geordie Way!!
"Dave Anderson (Labour) MP for Blaydon for Prime Minister!!" |
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Appeal Update and Advice Please
