Another day, another dumb letter ....

by Paula Dean

I get a lot of HMRC stamped mail to my address what with handling some peoples cases for them, but I can always tell straight away which ones involve my case (they address me differently), so when this one came through the door last Friday I ignored it for a few days. This has become standard practice for me when it involves my own case. When I get a HMRC letter regarding someone else’s case it stirs me into action, but when I know it’s about my own case I just dread opening it because I know the content is going to send me ranting to my files, cursing about never ending circles.

I know from a lot of the people I talk to that many feel this way when they receive case letters. We know it doesn’t really work, but we try avoiding it for a while, knowing full well that opening the letter could spoil the day, result in cancelled plans and endless contradicting phonecalls and mean more hours spent looking for and searching paperwork. And that’s just if it doesn’t contain threats of immediate prosecution or pulling our financial rug out from underneath us again.

But when I finally opened the letter, I honestly believe that if I had been within striking distance of the author I’d be in more trouble right now then having a £5K ‘debt’ I didn’t cause to deal with.

To cut a long story short, this letter was a response to a Request to Reconsider Recovery letter I had supposedly sent HMRC recently. Immediately I was confused as my dispute is with the Parliamentary Ombudsman and has been for about a year now. So why would I have written a RRR to HMRC. The letter then goes on at some length to detail known facts about my case and then rehashes the same excuses used previously to try and pass off the ‘overpayment’ as my fault.

What’s shocking about this is that actually the letter being ‘responded’ to was not a RRR or anything of that type, and in fact it was addressed to my local tax office, not the Preston TCO Customer Care (sic) dept that was responding. It concerned a recent phonecall where the local tax officer insisted that I had to do HMRC jobs for them in keeping the local tax office up to date with the status of my dispute. I was writing to 1) prove the status of my dispute and 2) to complain at being expected to do HMRC liaison for them.

Nowhere in this short 3 paragraph letter did I request HMRC reconsider the overpayment or request a re-run of their excuses. The nature of the letter is plainly evident - as is my name, gender and title, yet the chauvinist pigs still addressed it to my husband!

So what has this exercise in futility achieved? Nothing! My case is still with the PO, no one has responded to my complaint about being expected to do HMRC’s job for them, I have now had to write and research 2 letters not even relevant to the overpayment and the HMRC author managed to spend several working hours on a response to a letter they plainly didn’t read.

This afternoon I agreed to take part in some ‘customer research’ being conducted for the Adjudicators Office. I mainly just had to answer; agree / disagree and strongly / slightly to about 30 questions, but I got the chance to comment at the end of the interview. When asked what I would like to say about the Adjudicators Office, (resolving to remain constructive lol) I said that “I felt the AO did not take relevant circumstances into account when adjudicating disputes. Members of the public when complaining about the conduct of a government body to the AO are being expected to conduct themselves in the same manner of the agencies involved. I.e. we are expected to keep as good a tax record as the Tax Office even when we didn’t know we would need to. Yet this is not our professional capacity (i.e. our job), while it is solely HMRC’s, so they should be expected to do it better than us."
To quote the ironic recent HMRC letter; “it is clear that we have not handled your tax credits claim as well as we should have, and that we have failed to provide the level of service which you are entitled to expect and should received.”

No kidding!

Paula (disheartened? Maybe a little .... Giving up? Never!)

http://www.taxcc.org/