Amnesty for Victims of the Tax Credit Overpayment Farce

latest figures are now 2 million families a year overpaid. please see the site at www.TaxCC.org

To:  Gordon Brown

Amnesty for victims of the Tax Credit overpayment farce

The fundamental systematic errors that have lead to Inland Revenue (now handled by Customs and Excise) Tax Credit recovery bills landing on door mats, has caused panic, distress and poverty to hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country.

For those of you who don't know what going on; 100,000's of people who applied for Tax Credit (a kind of state benefit for those on low income)...

- Were never made sufficiently aware that the awards (the payments) were based on their previous year’s earnings and guesswork. The payments were therefore only provisional. Basically that if their income went up in the current year i.e. if they got a better paid job, they would have to pay it all back. I, for one, would never have gambled with that amount of money, knowingly.
- Supplied information that was not acted on, and they did not know that the payments they continued to receive were not correct, because paperwork was either too complicated to follow, or in a lot of cases, inaccurate.

Other issues included wrong and misleading information supplied by TC’s, wide scale computer failure and untrained staff inputting data wrongly. I know that there will be those out there who will say that the people in this position were not entitled to the payments and therefore should pay it back. But the point is that we were being told we were. Years later they come knocking on doors, demanding it all back because their figures didn’t match with their guesses.

Over 82,000 households have been overpaid. The government states that “people will not be forced to give back money as long as the overpayment is the government's fault”, but when victims dispute a ‘recovery’ and point out that they ‘could not reasonably have known there was an error’ they get drowned in complicated paperwork that even top university professors couldn’t follow, (as evidenced in a recent TV documentary) that ends in TC’s blaming the claimant for not understanding the process.

If victims get past that, they might eventually end up with a letter admitting the errors. But I have several, and despite the governments promise, I am being taken to court to recovery the remaining £4000.

I am just one of many. Since starting to organize support for those effected I have come across so many awful examples of what this has caused. See my website for a sample of some of them. http://www.taxcreditoverpayment.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Make no mistake; this farce has had very serious consequences for hundreds of thousands of people up and down the UK.

Right now, it is causing poverty for over 82,000 families as they struggle to repay the money they were given in recognition of their low income. As well as claimants having to get by without their current awards, that can be suspended while TC’s investigate cases.

This situation has caused utter despair, ruin, relationship breakdowns, ill health and poverty. Judging by some of the letters I’ve received and my own state of mind at times, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out it has caused suicide as well.

Currently appeals are being handled on a case by case basis and depend on how hard you resist them passing the buck. Meanwhile over a quarter of a million people are left desperate.

The demands of this petition are …………
• All cases where official error has been admitted be written off
• All other cases in dispute to be handled with a REASONABLE expectation of what a claimant should have known considering the untrained staff, the masses of complicated paperwork, the misinformation and the failure of computer equipment and the operators. (These are undisputedly “the governments fault” not the claimants.)
• Ambiguous cases (i.e. too complicated to unpick) that would cause hardship to recover to be dropped.

For too long the victims of this farce have been labeled either too stupid to fill a form in right, or frauds, and have had to pay for it with poverty and stress. The true scale of this problem continues to go unreported by the media and is ignored by those that caused it or could solve it.

You don’t have to be a TC victim to support our cause.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The Amnesty for Victims of the Tax Credit Overpayment Farce Petition to Gordon Brown was created by and written by Paula Dean (taxcreditoverpayment@blueyonder.co.uk ).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.