I now have two cases where overpayments of tax credits have been fully remitted. Here are the details, in case they can help anyone else:

Client was claiming working tax credit and child tax credit as a single parent until 28/4/03 when her partner moved in with her. Client informed tax credit office of the change of circumstances in advance of her partner moving in. Client completed and returned promptly the forms she was sent (ie to establish a joint claim for tax credits). An award notice for the joint claim was issued on 24th July 2003. Between 28/4/03 and 24/7/03 client continued to receive tax credit payments. Client contacted the tax credit office to query this and was told that she was entitled to these payments until the joint claim was processed. Client then received finalised award notices for period 2003/2004. Client's finalised award notice for her individual claim states an overpayment of CTC of £112.39 and an overpayment of WTC of £483.38. Client came to bureau on 8/7/04 and we assisted with completion of a request to reconsider recovery of overpayment. Client never received a response to this request. Bureau made repeated calls to helpline for updates, with no success. In November client received a notice to pay. Bureau wrote a letter of complaint to the customer services team on 24/11/04. Repeated telephone calls to request a response to this complaint have now produced a letter from Customer Service Team stating the overpayments team "have decided that we have fallen short of delivering a satisfactory level of service when dealing with your claim and have remitted the outstanding amount of £595.77."
HURRAH!!! Unfortunately, I have other cases with almost identical circumstances in which remittance has been denied. What makes this one different????

Second case: Red A overpayment case - i.e. that useful little computer bug that calculated thousands of awards incorrectly in June 2004. Client received the usual letter in August 2004 advising her that she had been overpaid £1513.59 due to the computer error. Bureau assisted client to complete request to reconsider recovery of overpayment on 3/9/04. In November client received a letter from the overpayments team stating "the overpayment was not due to a mistake on our part and will be recovered from you" - Obviously completely ridiculous since they had already admitted their mistake caused the overpayment. Bureau sent a letter of complaint to Customer Services Team on 24/11/04. Again, after repeated calls for an update or response we have now received a letter stating, " it has been decided the overpayment in respect of this award should now be remitted." HURRAH!!HURRAH!!. The letter does go on to state, "the remit button on the computer system is not operational at present and until is does become operational we will not be able to physically remit the overpayment." (Couldn't have possibly expected 100% service I suppose).

Anyway, I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but again I have several other Preston, "Red A" overpayment cases in the system, that just keep receiving negative decisions. What makes these two cases so different to all the others I am pursuing?? Can anyone spot the difference?? Or have the tax credit office just looked up the definition of "reasonable" in a new dictionary??

Good results. I think i may try the customer services route for one of mine. Still sounds like a labour intensive job though! But well done the IR are not cold hearted bulwarks of an oppressive bureaucracy after all. Or am I getting carried away!

Great work.

The most likely explanation concerning the lack of decision consistancy is lack of training and specific guidance (many of us will remember the introduction of the social fund with similar affection). In the first case, there was clear evidence of official error, because of the accepted notification. They clearly also accept that the subsequent IR advice (that the award was correct pending the new claim), was actually given. Did they listen to the CD copy of the call?. Don't know what to make of the second case.

Having to use the complaints route make a nonsense of the phoneline/COP 26 approach we are told is the way to go.

Steve

I don't know if they listened to the call again because they don't say in the letter how they arrived at the decision. I do know that in other cases where a client states that they checked several times with the helpline that payments were correct, the overpayments team have ignored this and still said "it was not reasonable....etc". In the other cases I have requested CD copies of the calls for my clients in order to pursue the cases to the adjudicator.

I agree that there appears to be a lack of training and specific guidance. We have requested copies of the guidance used by overpayment decision makers, but the IR say they cannot give us this. If I continue to get negative decisions in similar cases then I will ask for detail of how these positive decisions were made. I am particularly concerned about the "Red A" cases, because IR admits that it was a computer error which caused the miscalculations and clients award notices contain all the correct details, except, of course, the entitlement figure is incorrect. How they can possibly argue that the client "should have reasonably been aware payments were incorrect", I don't know.

Andrea