Furious with Tax Credits keep people in debt

[StarUtopia]

Oh I am SO ANGRY. Not been paid our child tax credits since May so just phoned up to ask why. We don't get much..just £10 a week but it all helps to pay our nursery bills and I am very grateful (we both work)

Rang just now. Apparently we now earn just over the threshold (P60 from Dh showed a £4k increase in pay this year vs last year) so that's why they've stopped. Ok, that's fine, totally understand.

However, we now owe them £1600 apparently. Because they base payments on last years incomes etc, they have overpaid us by that much.

I have so many transcripts where I have repeatedly asked, are you sure you have the right information from us, are you sure you are not paying us too much , are you sure that's what we are entitled to etc etc etc.

About 8 years ago they overpaid us by £6k and we've spent the last 6 years receiving a lot less than entitled to in order to pay off that debt.

To now find that again we have been overpaid has just devastated me. We are in debt still from last time ( live in our overdraft) I have no chance of finding that kind of money. The nice man (felt for him) said we won't be 'billed' until April next year and then can request it gets paid over a few years if necessary.

But what is the point of a system that says you're entitled to something and then turns round at the end (when you now do earn too much) And says, actually, you need to repay us now.

Any tips for sorting this out?

I had 4 jobs last year, now faced with a tax bill.
dh worked over time last year too.
faced with a tax credit bill.
Hardly had any tax credit last year either
thankfully i am on a DMP and will ring them and readjust, fingers crossed I get a sympathetic person on the end of the phone.

I had to go online and do my return the other day for the last two tax years and and estimate for this year.

There’s nowhere online to enter that you were on maternity or for how many weeks. And there’s nowhere to enter additional income eg dividends which we get. This means the calculations will be wrong, so I’ll get some stroppy letter shortly and then I’ll have to phone them to sort it all out...

Even their forms dong know what they’re doing.

@SinkGirl the maternity is taken into account in the deductions section you deduct £100 per week for every week you were on maternity off your annual income for that year

Xenia gets a little confused when not everyone is able to be a forward thinking, perfectly abled, pushy, career person. Lesser beings somehow.

They’ve just clobbered us for £5000. I started working more or less full time a Feb 2016. Rang them up, told them straight away. We had, to my mind we’re quite high payments. I called them to query. They said it was for childcare (£150 per week). So I took their word for it. I got a new, slightly higher paying job in March 5is year, tang and updated them. After our renewal I can see we’re getting like £11 per week so I called them. They’d over paid us £5k. Apparantly, and the guy on the phone said no one would of told us this, but we should of called in April after new tax year as the allowance we were getting wa son 2015-2016.

I just don’t understand, they had all the information, he could see that everything we told them was correct but for some reason they just couldn’t update it. I even checked it was right! It was even around April time but they still didn’t say anything about adjusting

I was overpaid by £450 (thank god it wasn't more!).

Best thing I ever did was switch to UC (no more worrying).

We were purposely overpaid a few years ago from October to March as t c said that it was a hardship payment or something But because our income had changed, from the following April onwards we weren’t entitled to any t c at all and would be required to repay the ‘hardship payment’. I refused the hardship payment up front but apparently it was compulsory. So as it was paid, I saved it up over the 6 months then just paid all the money back the following June when the invoice arrived

That was a great use of my time I can tell you!

It's awful but I'm not sure what the alternative is. My mum was on pension credit, housing benefit etc. Years ago she had written a textbook and she got a payment for a couple of hundred pounds (which represented several years royalties for an out of date book). She declared the income and her benefits were immediately stopped for six weeks while they assessed her and said it could be months
I could pay her rent for the six weeks but we had no idea what to do if longer. They then each deducted 60% of the money, meaning overall her benefit was reduced by 120% of the money she'd received. She was really worried. The stupid thing is she could potentially earn small amounts and reduce her dependence on benefits but she is scared to. Anything she does now is on a strict proceeds to charity basis.

I think there should be a grace period so reduction in benefits should be phased in. If we can only assess once a year then in year changes within x should be tolerated on the assumption that next year's assessment will be based on the higher figure

Sink, that can be the problem with on-line filings that HMRC and other big companise who want to save themselves time and money seem to love - not much scope or space to add a note or comment or they don't read the comments - they ignored mine one year and raised the same query on my return they had raised the year before when they had all the papers.

I am finding this more and more as companies go on line - you cannot put in the comment or variable that you need. HMRC had to force a lot of people back into paper filings last year as their systems did not yet take account of some change - I think changes on dividend taxation.

(No one i s a lesser being. I was just saying that trying to get higher pay is not a bad idea and keeps you out of the tax credit trap. I realise lots of people can't however and above I was sympathising).

I know universal credit bgets a bad rap but hopefully overpayment will be minimised.

When I transfered from tax credits to universal credit I was overpaid by tax credits but a 1000 at least. Am now paying them bk out of my uc. Yanbu!

I rang to tell them of extra income last year. We went from about 60pw to 20 pw.

I have been saving that because I felt it could be over payment.

I'm about to tell them of much higher earnings now ( 3 _ 8,grand higher).

I'm really worried about this. I'm hoping the drop from 60 to 20 will mean we won't have huge over payment?? I'm assuming since April pay of 20 that will be the over payment?

It’s not as simple as basing your income on the previous year. It’s only if your income changes by less than £2,500 they use previous years.
This explains it www.entitledto.co.uk/help/how-tax-credits-work
It is a crap system though and so hard to understand.

I would definitely dispute the overpayment though. If you have provided them with all the correct information and they have overpaid you based on this then you won’t have to pay it back.

Dwangela on the paper forms it is. When you do the return online it doesn’t ask about maternity pay or paternity pay. When you add this year’s estimated income you can only add employment and self-employment, not other income (which they require). Even worse, if youve already notified them of the additional income, it’s in their system but you can’t see or update it.

YANBU. I have encountered people in debt during my career, and many have had issues with tax credits.

I knew some people with as much as £5000 to £8000 tax credits 'overpayment' (a few with even more,) and it caused a few of them so much hardship, that they ended up going bankrupt.

The Tax credits department lost out though, as the overpayments were included in peoples bankruptcies, and they got sod-all back!

Tax credits are a fucking car crash, and I have no idea how there have been so many massive fuck-ups, leaving so many people in financial dire straits. If a company or business behaved in this manner, they would be shut down within MONTHS if they made so many glaring errors.

Yet, the tax Credits Department seem to constantly get away with it, and they keep doing it! You can't fight it though, because it's 'Government.' I think many people have been badly affected by tax credits fuck-ups, and even if THEY haven't they know someone who has.