Just spoke to a client who is being paid her tax credits manually - for some reason the system couldn't cope with their changes in circumstances during the year. She was worried about whether she has been overpaid, rang TCO and was told that the system would work out her entitlement for the year gone by, and pay her entire entitlement to tax credits for the year into her bank account - regardless of the fact that she has been paid manually - an automatic overpayment if ever there was one. She was told to then take this money out of her account and bring it back to her local IREC. Client asked only to be paid what she's owed, was told that the system does this automatically.

Seems unbelieveable.

But apparently unavoidable. Just had an exactly similar issue where I've been told they can pay a large amount of arrears manually but that it will be automatically duplicated when computer starts to pay properly.

Nothing about the IR surprises me any more!!
Am I alone in feeling like the IR occupy a parallel universe?

Not so much parallel, but more off at a tangent I would have thought -.................. most certainly a world of their own

It doesn't matter which angle you look at it. It's always pear shaped when it comes to dealing with Tax Credits.
I had a client who knew she was being over paid TC's so she put all the money into a savings account (interest etc). When she finally got an overpayment demand, she sent them a cheque for the full amount. Next month she gets a payment from them for the same amount of the cheque. So she sent another cheque. Same thing happens the following month and so it went on and on each month. Finally she came to see us, and we wrote to them to ask why this was happening. We never got a reply (that's a surprise), anyway the payments stopped after we sent the letter, don't know if it was coincidence or luck.

I know Shawn has posted minutes of meetings with TCO / Revenue staff, there have been Early Day Motions and various online fora facilitiating discussion on the issues. But there has to come a point when we see action to remedy the issues being highlighted.

The minutes talked about a register of issues raised - with outcomes - and I think it's about time there was a national issues register, which haunts the Revenue forever and a day until they get each issue sorted. We (adviceNI) are just completing our report on the eConsultation on overpayments and there will be an action point / issues register section which we will bang on about until it sinks in.