IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED A LETTER OF OVERPAYMENT FROM THE TAX CREDIT OFFICE, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING

You open a letter that you have received from the Tax Credit Office (TCO). This is a letter you were not expecting. Upon reading the word “Overpayment” you become increasingly concerned. The letter informs you that the TCO has overpaid you. It wants the money back, and in the meantime, any money that it was paying may now have been stopped.

It may be £1,000, £2,000 or even more. How do you feel? You do not have the available funds to repay the money that the TCO is seeking, and you do not know how you are going to find the funds to pay back the overpayment. Paying the household bills is already a struggle. Receiving the tax credits helped you to pay most of them but now you struggle further to find the money. You are in a state of shock, but you try not to panic. You believe that there must be an administrative error, and that making a telephone call to the TCO will put everything right, allowing you to get on with your life as before.

So you telephone the Tax Credit helpline. Your intention is to explain to the advisor at the end of the phone that they have made an error, and that the payments must be re-instated without delay. But even before you can do this, you have to go through the security measures that are in place. You spend a couple of minutes giving your name and address and confirming your identity, and soon realize that you are facing an uphill struggle to make yourself understood. The voice on the other end of the line does not understand your own personal predicament. And why should they? They deal with thousands of callers everyday who have the same problem. The only thing the advisor can do is to provide you with information accessible to them on their screens. They cannot resolve your problem. They do not have the expertise.

Before too long, you find that you are raising your voice at the advisor through utter frustration. You are getting nowhere fast until you finally believe that telephoning the TCO was a waste of your valuable time. Whilst you now understand that talking to the advisor is not going to get you anywhere, you decide to try and explain your situation one more time. You believe that one last attempt to explain how the TCO has come to make an error, will surely pay off. After all, it has to. What else can you do!!!

The telephone call finally ends leaving you feeling as though you have no control over events. What is more, you feel overwhelmed. You have no money, and yet you are being chased by the TCO for potentially thousands of pounds. Now you really are panicking. What do you do? What can you do? The answer is to take control of the situation.

If you can identify with the above scenario, then you should read my guide “A Practical Guide to Dealing With the Tax Credit Office”

It’s full of really useful informative information about how to

• Dispute a letter of overpayment
• Make an appeal
• Draft letters of complaint
• Request information under the Data Protection Act 1998 and Freedom of Information Act 2000
• Obtain free legal advice
• And much more