Understand the Jargon

Probably the first thing to do is straighten out the jargon and terminology the Tax Credit Office (TCO) and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) use, because most of it seems deliberately deceptive in order to put you off contesting an overpayment bill.

• Award: This is the amount TCO have been paying you. It can mean either the amount of the 4-weekly payments, or the total amount for the whole year.
• Appeal: Most of you will have been told “you have no right of appeal”. Ignore it. What ordinary humans and what HMRC call an Appeal are two completely different things. If you have been landed with an overpayment bill, you don’t want to appeal anyway. An Appeal is a Tax Law process that usually revolves around contesting a decision by HMRC (i.e. the amount of your Award etc.)
• Request to Reconsider Recovery (RRR): Sometimes called a Dispute. This is the usual route to use when you are contesting Overpayment claims. With this route you are ‘asking’ HMRC / TCO to write off the overpayment bill on the grounds that you could not be expected to know the award payments were wrong. Usually this involves highlighting the mistakes made on their part, which made your claim so difficult to follow that you didn’t know or understand what payments you were supposed to be receiving.
• Complaint: This is not an Appeal, or an RRR, but can be used as the second stage of disputing an overpayment bill. This is a complaint about their handling of your case, i.e. official errors, excessive delays, idiotic application of policy etc. One may be instigated for you while going through the prior process, or they may try to ignore every attempt you make to lodge one. Like most of the system it is very random, unpredictable and thoroughly fallible.
• In Year Adjustment: This is when your circumstances changed during the Award payment year (6th April to 5th April), and the TCO have been notified, so your entitlement changes.
• Year End Adjustment / Calculation: This is when TCO review your actual income figures and circumstances for the year (usually the June after the year they awarded you TC for). This is when the calculations for your real entitlement are done, which are then weighed up against what they actually paid you. Any balance or deficit is an underpayment or overpayment. Until this stage they are using last year’s income details and any changes in circumstances you reported which they bothered to log.

Try to use the right terminology when corresponding with TCO, and challenge any confusing terminology they use: i.e. they are known to sometimes call RRR’s Appeals / Complaints / Disputes and vice versa.