How to Dispute a Tax Credit Overpayment: Step 2

Claim Your Data

While you are waiting for a response to your TC846, claim your data by submitting a Subject Access Request (SAR) under the Data Protection Act (1998). You can use our sample "Subject Access Request" letter to do this.

Send your SAR letter to:

HMRC Tax Credits,
Subject Access Request Team,
Floor 1 Area E,
St. Marks House,
Stanley Street,
Preston,
PR1 4AT.

HMRC have 40 days to send you all relevant case information that they hold on your Tax Credits award. This should include disc copies of any phone calls that you have made and that they have recorded.

What SAR Data Will You Receive?

When you receive your data, it will probably be a bundle of around 200 to 300 A4 photocopies that look mainly repeated and gibberish.

• Typically half of these pages are plain text print outs containing claimant personal data such as names, ages, family, N.I. numbers. Usually I find these bits pretty useless.
• ‘Screen captures’ (they look like a photocopy of a computer screen) will hold the most detail.
• There should also be copies of any letters sent or received about your award and dispute.
• Copies of any forms sent, such as Income Declarations and TC846 (RRR) forms. Unfortunately, application forms and awards notices aren't usually included, so you're not able to tell whether HMRC actually input the data from these forms correctly.
• An abbreviation key, so that you can translate some of the jargon on the data. It's actually quite rare to receive these, but if you didn't get one, we have an online Abbreviation Key here.
• A compact disc containing copies of any recorded phone calls you made to HMRC about your Tax Credits award. They have only recently promised to record most calls, and have lost quite a few million too! So they may not have copies of any calls you made, (they swear this isn’t a fix, honest), or they may have just decided to not send them even if they do have them. To demand calls if they are not supplied, use our  sample "Missing Data" complaint letter.

While you are waiting for them to supply your data, use any notes you have, or any details you remember, to rough out what you know about your disputed claim in old to new date order. This will also help you when you come to write your case history letter for the next stage (step 3) of your dispute. Anything can be useful. Phone bills might give dates and times of calls made to HMRC, for example.

If they delay in supplying your data, or no calls have been supplied, or there seems to be other information missing, you can complain to HMRC using this sample "Missing Data" complaint letter.

HMRC are notorious for missing out the one bit of data that would prove that you were right and they were wrong. So, if they don't respond or don't send the missing data after you've contacted them about it, complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) with the aim of forcing HMRC to supply it.

While you're waiting for your data to arrive, move on to putting together your Case History in the next dispute step.