Jill Brown, a widow of three years, claims that she is still receiving mail from HMRC for her deceased husband (who used to be a tax consultant).
There appears to be a glitch in the HMRC computer system, which means that each month people's personal tax details are sent to Mrs Brown's address in the name of her late husband.
Mrs Brown claims that she has repeatedly told HMRC about this problem, and returned letters to HMRC's office in Merrywalks Stroud, but the letters keep coming.
I believe there is a specific form that the Post Office can supply, that can stop mail to the deceased. This may be a speedier and more effective solution than waiting for HMRC to sort this mess out.
Tax does have to be taxing.
HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"
Why not just do what I do with junk mail?
ReplyDeleteCollect it up until one appears with a pre-paid return envelope, then I stuff everything I've collected into that one overstuffed envelope and drop it in the letterbox. Don't care which company it all goes to.
The information on the post is obviously public domain already. Hopefully they get surcharged by the postal service for overweight replies and then have to log and/or scan the contents in their post rooms too.
That is brilliant. I'm totally going to start doing that.
ReplyDeleteShame you have to open them to find out which have reply envelopes.
In these days when so many people claim to know so much about using computers. I get cross at people's lack of business accumen. Nobody's computer syatems are like Star Trek - there are limits to the amount of available storage space. Each t/p record may contain the name of an agent, if one has been appointed. It is usual to set up or delete an agent as being authorised on a masterfile, but once that name is added to a number of individual record(s), it becomes time consuming to delete each one individually. Strange thing is we used to do it using punched cards 30yrs ago.
ReplyDeleteP.S. If however, you are able to supply a list of client's with their UTR or NINO then you may be lucky enough to get someone to do it as a one off job if the list is not too long.
ReplyDeleteSurely it shouldn't be necessary to go through each of an agent's clients, anonymous (no relation). HMRC deals with thousands of agents, all of whom eventually stop trading for one reason or another. The database(s) surely must have the ability to flag up an agent as having ceased and automatically remove him/her from each client's records. Even HMRC's IT consultants should've worked that one out.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't seem to have worked in this case, of course.