Current case where IR appear to be recovering a real last year overpayment in full and also recovering potential in year overpayment in full too for someone on CTC no earnings leaving them with £11 per week only. One child.

Last page of letter goes along the lines of:

Full amount for the period is £900

Amount we owe you for other periods £400

Amount already paid £300

Amount to be paid £200

The 'amount for other periods' owed is actualy an overpayment as you can tell from the numbers. NB award is only for part of year as child ceases to be part of claim in September so the £900 part is correct (something had to be I guess). Amount declared already paid is too high on effective weekly rate for part of year covered by notice so is effective in year overpayment recovery.

My first advice was to get a top-up payment but seemingly this can only top-up for perceived in-year o/p and award doesn't explicitly show one of these so in my experience if this was the case IR would refuse to pay one anyway.

My main question is would this be different if IR had entered £400 properly on as overpayment not underpayment (and I thought that all underpayments were meant to be being paid as lump sums anyway)? Does anyone know???

Client has challenged everything at every stage in the correct way.

Please help, drowning.

I assume from what you say that the £400 is in fact an 03-04 overpayment. If so, what they should have done is to take the correct 04-05 award (£900), deduct the amount already paid in 04-05 (£300 - which I assume was the provisional payment until the renewal had been processed) and reduce the £600 balance by 25% to £450 to recover part of the 03-04 overpayment. (This 25% assumes the client is not on the minimum - family element only - rate of CTC , and not on the maximum rate , as per COP26.)

I have seen an award which actually does this (although the figures are - inevitably - set out in a way which makes it difficult to understand).

So the answer is - yes, it should be different if my assumptions are correct.

Andrew:

Have you done a BEF for your client's case? I know that Katie at NACAB - who does Social Policy work for Tax Credits - wants to know about this sort of problem, with an anonymised copy of the award notice if possible.