Poor old HMRC and wee Gordon "Smiler" Brown, they just can't seem to get anything right at the moment. One of wee Gordie's "flagship" schemes, the "respected" tax credit scheme, has taken another well deserved battering.
The National Audit Office (NAO) has lambasted the scheme, noting that it is losing over £1.5BN a year as a result of overpayments and fraudulent claims.
To add insult to injury, Tim Burr (head of the NAO) has refused to sign off the annual accounts of HMRC because of its appalling mistakes and cock ups.
How embarrassing for an organisation that expects its "customers" to have perfect records!
Brown's lackeys in parliament were quick to dismiss this as....errmmmm......."teething troubles".
Are they taking the piss here?
Some "teething troubles", when up to £1.54BN (that's over 8% of the total) of tax credit payments were wasted because of error and fraud during the 2006-07 financial year.
As at March this year, £4.3BN remained to be recovered from claimants.
Jane Kennedy, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said that HMRC had been given until 2011 to cut the level of error and fraud to 5% (it currently stands at 7.6%)
Is she taking the piss?
-5% is way too lax a target
-2011 is hardly a stretching deadline
Pathetic by anyone's standards!
Dump these time wasting, money wasting and shoddily administered credits; increase the personal allowances instead.
Tax does have to be taxing.
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Hear hear, give the lower paid back some pride, restore incentives to work and cut out all the idiot state beurocracy.
ReplyDeleteDarn, I can never remember how to spell bureaucrat.
ReplyDeleteI work for HMRC in one of their contact centres so would like to clear up a little myth surrounding overpayments relating to Tax Credits, if I may. The overpayments that are constantly mentioned are as a direct result of taxpayers not notifying HMRC of their change of circumstances, not an error by HMRC. If a taxpayer does not inform the HMRC that they have had a pay rise or that the costs of their childcare has decreased or stopped altogether, how the hell are we meant to know? Every single person who receives Tax Credits is sent a notice instructing them to notify HMRC if certain circumstances change. If the claimant fails to do so, it is not HMRC's fault that they have been overpaid.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous at HMRC ... you're living in cloud-cuckoo land if you think that every overpayment is caused by non-notification.
ReplyDeleteThere are many, many people who have done everything right, only to be given huge overpayment bills. Some are down to computer errors, some down to call-centre errors. People are still disputing overpayments from 2003-04 : do you think they would still be bothering if they weren't in the right?
The Tax Credit Office doesn't respond to the vast majority of letters - I've been waiting two years to get questions answered. Many others have waited longer.
It's a total mess.
You have a right to be proud of who you work for, but open your eyes and stop being part of the problem.
It strikes me that anyone who works there must have taken hundreds, if not thousands of calls... Would suggest they probably do know what causes overpayments.. Also if it were me & I got an overpayment because I didnt do something, I would rather chose to blame the people giving me the overpayment, then myself.. Obviously I could never of made a mistake.. Human nature insists on that fact!
ReplyDelete