Tax Credit disaster...please please help

[WhollyShits]

Christol on a bike. I have had my tax credit renewal through. I have been overpaid by approx £3500!!! So, i will not be receiving ANY payments this year

I phoned up because i thought it must be a mistake. But it is true!! Not only will i receive no payments, but also they want me to repay the £3500

They overpaid me because they input my expected earnings for 2017-2018 as ZERO!!!

What the hell am i gooing to do?? This reduces my monthly income by over £300 plus whatever amount i need to pay them

I feel sick

If you have provided all the correct information and it is their mistake you definitely DON’T have to re-pay them.

There is lots of advice/guidance on line. It is definitely worth disputing it with them. You need to stress that you have them all the correct information.
Along the lines of ‘I rang on xxx date and provided my income as X’.
I then received your letter dated xxxx which confirms the information I provided. The letter states my income is X which is correct’
‘I checked the letter for my income 2016-2017 which is X. This is correct’
‘I checked the letter for my estimated income due 2017-2018. The letter states this is X. This is correct’.
‘All the information I have provided is correct and all the information on your letters is correct. I have not given the incorrect income details at any point’. Etc.

Don’t be daft!

Do you think that TELLING them they’re wrong means they let you keep the money they should not have given you in the first place?

Oh if only that were true...

@Hissy it’s true. If it’s HMRC error, you don’t have to pay them back. There is lots of information about it on-line.

I’ve been successful with a claim myself for exactly this reason.

Unfortunately, many people don’t know about it/believe it to be true and so re-pay the overpayment when they could have disputed it.

Please go to your local CAB who will help you I. Either seeking a reconsideration of the decision and/or negotiating a repayment plan

hissy i came on to reply similar. It does matter to them that they made the mistake. It only matters that people have received money they are not entitled too...which must be paid back

And I DO understand that principle and agree with the theory of it

Except the practicality is; i planned a household budget which is now £300 short. £300 is the shopping budget per month...food, toiletries, household cleaning stuff. AND they want me to pay back the over payment. I have no idea how we are going to pay for life

*DOESNT matter to them, i meant

Honestly OP, please dispute this. There are specialist advisors who deal with exactly this. It sounds like you can prove it was their error, in which case you have an excellent chance of being successful.

www.advicenow.org.uk/guides/survival-guide-dealing-tax-credit-overpayments
This may be a good start but there are lots of other resources available to help you.

The main thing you need to do is prove that everything YOU provided was correct.

I had an overpayment in what sounds like exactly the same circumstances, I disputed and was successful. Didn’t have to re-pay anything.

In terms of whether they legally have to make you re-pay is does matter that it was their mistake. That is the main basis of the dispute.

Disputes are usually only successful if the Tax Credit Office made a mistake

This is from the gov.uk website itself.

little i will definitely dispute it.

Oh good. It may be worth speaking to/seeing an advisor as they can advise exactly what to include, how to word, etc to give you the best chance of success.

It’s really stressfull but from what you’ve said it sounds like you have a really good chance so definitely worth doing.

Good luck, let us know how you get on as it may help others who think you have to re-pay the overpayments regardless of it being HMRC error.

Contact your MP, they overpaid us by £4500 as they ticked the wrong box for DH's ESA, written off and a whopping £50 in compensation

This happened to my mam when I was young. She owed £14,000.

She's still paying it off now! In very small amounts (she's unable to work).

Give them a ring and tell them you can't afford to pay it back at once.

I am on my last month of reduced payments due to an overpayment and it has meant I've had to cut down. I've not read through the whole thread, but because our tax credits went down we then became eligible for housing benefit.

To clarify, say for ease your salary is £10k a year...

• You called and told them your salary is still £10k a year
• The calculation paperwork they sent you said that your salary is £10k a year, which is correct
• at some point they’ve input £0 as your earnings but this isn’t reflected in your paperwork

Is that right? If their error appeared in any paperwork they sent you, they won’t write it off as the onus is on you to check it sadly.

They once input £5k in benefits each for DH and I when we don’t get any benefits - there’s no way I said we did. Luckily I spotted it.

Definitely dispute it! I've had several letters over the years telling me I'd been overpaid by enormous amounts. None were correct. Once I got a letter saying I'd been overpaid by £2,800 and in the SAME POST was a letter confirming my payments were increasing slightly due to a change in circs. No one had any clue which, if either, was correct when I rang them. I also once received 13 identical letters from them on one day... My ex and I ended up taking one such error to a Tribunal and the judge/panel chair was appalled at the blatant errors they'd made. They had to pay us over £8,000 in arrears. In the end, they began paying us via Giro for 3 years as they claimed an IT fault was causing all these issues.

So as you may be able to tell, I don't have a great deal of faith in their systems .They don't know their arse from their elbow and their IT systems regularly make errors. The helpline advisers are trained to take calls, not on how to calculate the tax credits, so don't take their word for it that this is correct, Dispute it, in writing, and obtain proof of postage for every single piece of correspondence you send them. It's incredible how often post never arrives with them, or how often calls made to them aren't logged. I gave several friends who work or have worked for HMRC dealing with tax credits and they all confirm that my experiences are not unusual at all.

You have understood correctly sink

On no paperwork that i have received did it say that my predicted earnings would be zero. Unless you give them a figure, they base it on the previous year. That figure is on the paperwork. I always ask them to base it on previous years figure. I would never have said that my income was predicted as nothing! I work 37 hours/week. How the blinkin heck did they think that was the case??

The woman on the phone was totally unhelpful. Just kept saying i have already received my allowance this year so will now get nothing until april 2019. And she said i will receive a letter about how to repay the over payment

Its really hard to stay calm

If their error appeared in any paperwork they sent you, they won’t write it off as the onus is on you to check it sadly.
This is true but if you contact to them to inform them of the error (and they still proceed incorrectly, which is quite common) then you have a good chance of a successful dispute.

I would phone your local MP and ask for their assistance in negotiating with HMRC. They will do this for you and better than you trying to do so yourself

Reading everyones experience now and am wondering if the times they reclaimed over payments in the past were baded on nonsense also??

One year the predicted figure i gave them at the beginning of the year matched the final figure for my earnings. They said i had phoned mid way through the year and told them my earnings were much less!! I was mystified as to why i would have done that, but (STUPIDLY) believed them and made the repayments by reductions to my award over 2 years

I do wonder, if on balance, they have paid me anything at all!!

I meant to say thank you for everyones advice. And im so sorry for everyone this has happened to. It is so stressful

Just kept saying i have already received my allowance this year so will now get nothing until april 2019. And she said i will receive a letter about how to repay the over payment

Okay, let me see if this is correct...

They have been paying you around 300 a month?
So since April, you've had - say - 1500?
Yet they are saying you are owe them 3500?

Are they saying you would have been entitled to 1500 this year (18/19) but have had that in total by September so will receive nothing else before April 2019?

If your entitlement hasn't changed, that means the 3500 they claim you owe them must have been paid over the course two years --- 1500 annual award, yet they've paid you 3600 (300 x 12), so an overpayment of 2100 per year.

How exactly are the figures broken down on your letter? What are the dates they are saying the overpayment was made?

OP, I was just going to post that you have to give them the estimated figures by July every year, BUT then I remembered that my parents get a letter , with no figures on, that just says contact us if anything has changed, so if you got that letter, I can see why you wouldn't have reason to think they would have changed anything.

If they started paying you a lot more, you could have queried it though, which will be their defence. But not everybody understands how WTC works, as it can be so complicated.

If you are on PAYE there is no excuse for them to have the wrong figures, as they are automatically received from HMRC. They get self employed figures too via Self Assessment.

But they DO make mistakes, my parents are on a specific tax scheme, the tax return has to show figures in a certain way, which will be different to the ones provided for WTC. WTC rang to ask why the figures were different, and we had to write to tell them that according to HMRC's own rules, the figures were never going to match the tax return. We should not have to do that!

I hadnt actually had the wherewithal to break it down like that!

Im not at home now, so i will check later.

I'll also point out that the gov tax credit calculator will not allow you to input an income of "0" if you have said you are in employment. If the official system allows that, that's a major error that they need to rectify.