EddScott

I've decided to attempt to get some answers as to why our family hasn't been entitled to Working Families Tax Credit for the past 3 years.

This year becuase I didn't bother renewing the claim - believing there was no point as yet again they would tell us we owed them money - they sent me an invoice asking for about £600 which is what we as a family apparently owe them. I rang them and renewed my claim and even with the loss of one income we are only entitled to about £10 and can't have that until December 2007.

I'd be amazed if their hasn't been some sort of mistake. Currently we only have one income as my GF is "In between" jobs and even with the loss of her earnings c£10K we are still not entitled to a penny becuase we still owe them money.

Something happened when all the rules changed and I can't get to the bottom if it. I think we moved in during the year of the change and at that time we had one income of about £11,500 and so we received full entitlement. However the following year when they changed to these new rules my income doubled and my GF began working on about 10K. So we made the claim, told them we were on a joint income close to 30K and ever since we've been paying back the money we were given during that year out joint family income was on £11.5K.

Now to me this seems complete rubbish. We needed that money in the first year to survive and we were perfectly entitled to it. Its as though they think that we had all that money during the year we earnt £30K and we now have to pay it all back.

A colleague is only on £100 less than me a month and his GF works and they receive about £70 a week. We on the other hand have less overall income coming in but we don't get a penny.

Is there any way we can get our WFTC account investigated to find out exactly whats going wrong. If its our mistake then thats fine, perfectly accept it. But if its their mistake we have basically been turned over by the state.

Any help much appreciated.

pwhittle

They overpaid loads of people last year, and are clawng it back. I owe them £1400 apparently.
THey were told that if the overpayment was caused by the computer problems, they should consider writing it off - so it's worth appealling.
Didn't work for me though.
How much tax has been wasted on all this...

fast bloke

Sounds like you/they have got crossed wires - Easiest thing to do it get your P60's for each year in question and send them a letter detail total combined income for each year along with their calculation of your entitlement. I would have thought that about £400.00 per month would be sort of accurate on a combined income of 11k, dropping substantially as your incomes increased. I think the cut off point is around 50k combined. Might be worth talking to CAB as well