to swear at the Tax Credits advisor?

[MountEtna]

Feel a bit bad now - god knows why!

H and I split in July. We had a joint claim as he does not earn much and I am self employed. I was told I had to make a new single claim and they would immediately stop the joint one (fair enough) but it would take 2 weeks for me to get a claim form (can't do it on the phone) and then it would take a further 3 weeks to process. So OK I will be left for 5 weeks with no income as I cannot work if I can't pay the childcare for 3 DCs . H's maintenance is paying the essential bills like food and that's all really.

Rang today as I am 4 weeks down the line, to be told that the advisor is referring my claim to a specialist team as she needs more information. 'What information?' says I. 'I don't know' says she. 'So if you don't know what further information you need, why are you referring it to a specialist team?'. 'Can't answer that' says she. She also says it will take a further 4 weeks from today as it is going to this team.

By this time I have steam coming out of my ears so ask to speak to a manager as she is talking in riddles. After another 10 minute wait in addition to the 20 mins I waited to get through. The manager informs me that the cannot match my children up . The same children that were on my joint claim and have been claiming for years for. I say to him can you not just look at my joint claim and you will see that they were all on there. 'Hmm' says he 'it's not that easy'.

He appreciates my situation he says. Lone parent, no income, no money 8 weeks for childcare so cannot work to get some. I say 'you appreciate my situation, you don't give a flying FUCK' and slam the phone down.

What a bloody great system. Getting the money to those who need it!

AIBU to feel a bit stressed and a bit bad for being rude?

Mignonette, back in 2006 the Govt started closing tax offices and moving operations to call centres. People want to do everything by phone and there is no way that you could have phone contact on that scale and still get your job done. Similarly email was investigated but they realised that people would expect an instant response, and that just wasn't possible.

What they did was made all the experienced staff redundant. All those who cared about what they were doing, and understood that if they did X then Y would happen. They replaced them with people off the street, who read from a script and genuinely don't know much more than the caller.

And Joe Public says "cut these civil servants", then bleats "I can't get through to anyone".

Sabriel - the people in the contact centres are trained well. There are no 'scripts'. A lot of people from back offices were transferred to the centres. You obviously haven't a clue what you're talking about.

Sabriel...couldn't agree more.

Call centre staff are well trained and they are knowledgeable about Tax Credits and the systems they use (the systems the details are stored on). They have technical guidance available but no scripts. The computer system used is not self-explanatory, you need to be able to 'read' it, it doesn't say 'this is the problem and here's how to fix it', you have to check several screens, all of the notes, the technical guidance, and put the pieces together yourself. That takes training and experience.

Where their hands are tied is what they can actually do on the system. They can't override certain blocks placed by other departments, they can't issue payments, they can't transfer calls to the backoffice.

Saying they aren't trained or knowledgeable is an insult to them. When I worked in the TC call centre I had three weeks full time training followed by three weeks of support from floor-walkers. That's the technical side, the experience and confidence and in-depth knowledge takes longer. Further training is done every time new guidance is issued and coaching is done to check calls and training is given on any areas that are weak.

The problems are not the fault of the average advisor (I'm not saying all advisors, every organisation has dead weight but these are the in the minority), it's the system. Most advisors know how to fix the issues listed in the thread but don't have the system functionality to do so.

We are at cross purposes here Cbear and lisaro. Mignonette was talking about tax queries for her father, not TC, and that's what I was answering. I haven't had any dealings with TC advisors for several years, because I'm not eligible for them.

I was talking about the advisors on the normal tax helplines, who - at least when I left hmrc in 2009 - did read from a script and hadn't a clue how everything fitted in. It may all have changed now, but doesn't sound like it from Mignonette's description. I used to get the fall-out from the failed calls, as I was a complaints officer, so I do know what I'm talking about, thank you.

Sabriel - the contact centre people have NEVER had scripts - with all due respect, you're talking bollocks. And they are trained to go through all the different screens, understand and interpret the information. I would have expected a 'complaints officer' to be in possession of the working practices they supposedly deal with complaints about. Unlike you (I suspect) I actually have worked for HMRC and IR as it was previously. Why, oh why do you need to say such inaccurate stuff to try to make a point?

It's a bit like when, due to MASSIVE incompetence, my Tax Credits renewal one year wasn't processed for 6 MONTHS. I went 3 months living off just my Child Benefit (I was also caught between JSA and Incapacity Benefit at the time, so no income there either.)

I went into my local HMRC office, as I had heard about the hardship payments, and when they refused on the basis that their computers STILL wouldn't accept my bank account details (that they had been using for the prior 3 years...), I burst into floods of tears.

I had 3 young DC's to feed, the youngest was disabled and still in nappies, and as I had no money for electric, his essential oxygen pumps would not work.

I cried and cried, I physically couldn't 't MOVE from the chair, I was crying so much. They called the police, as I was disturbing the peace. By crying. Because when my DS2's batteries ran out, he would die because he would not be able to breathe.

The policeman got me a place in the refuge for that night, and got my MP involved.

Even with my MP's involvement, it STILL took another 3 months after that incident for payments to restart.

So it took their computers a full 6 months to process that renewal.

Ever since, I am obsessive when it comes to renewal time. I telephone the helpline and do a renewal by phone. I record the call (I warn them first), and I get them to confirm at the end of the call that the renewal has been done. I ALSO fill in the renewal form and post it to them, by signed for delivery.

And STILL this year I had an issue at renewal time. Because I had split up with my ex during that financial year, and he had been working, they wanted his P60 to confirm his annual income. Which he refused to provide, as they were sending the letters asking him for it to my address despite them having been informed by both of us that he was no longer resident here, and where he was living now.

It took them 6 weeks to accept that I had no way of making someone I didn't even live with anymore provide their P60 to them. They accepted that the info they had been given when we WERE still together was correct. But only because I went straight to the (same) MP again...

They are so inept, uncaring, heartless AND seemingly unable to understand that by the fact that they are CLAIMING Tax Credits, they don't have enough sodding income to live off without it, it is unbelievable.

They're still not as bad as the people who sit in the Bolton clerical office of the CSA scratching their arseholes for 8 hours a day, though...

Now they couldn't organise a welly wanting contest in the Hunter factory, never mind a piss up in a brewery.

If the case is clerical, and a human has to physically click a button on the computer every week to release the payment to the bank, it is surely not too much to expect that someone actually DOES this on the day they are fucking meant to?!

When you need that money to pay your DC's bus fares to bloody school, and you get a payment on X day, and then 7 days later you don't get your payment and in fact have to wait 19 days for the next one, get another one 3 days later, and another 4 days after that, it starts to get on your tits.

So you phone them and request a schedule for the next month. And the same thing happens. So you contact your ex. Who gets all indignant at the 'accusation' that he hasn't been paying on time, and shows you a bank statement showing payments leaving his account by SO every 7 days.

You then phone them back. And they admit to you that 'no one released the payment'. And that they aren't authorised to release the payment, only your case worker is. Who seemingly only works between 10am and 12pm on a Tuesday. But she's on annual leave next week...

I now have finally told them to stick their useless intermediary service up their own behinds, and am frankly glad to be shot of the incompetent buffoons. Even if it does leave my maintenance payments at the whim of my EA ex, who stops paying if he even gets a whiff that I might have been asked out on a date by someone. The payments are STILL more Cunting regular than when he was paying the CSA by SO every damn week...

Just WHY are these Government departments allowed to get away with total incompetence like this? In any private business, they would lose the contract for the fuck ups that prevail in the HMRC, the CSA and the DWP. It beggars belief really...