Rantblip!

Sorry for the dull photo, but this has been all I could think of.

Some time ago I discovered that my income tax had been overpaid by about £950 last year. At the time I found this out I wasn't able to send my relevant paperwork into the tax office due to the fact that I needed it to show the agency I have to go through for my work now.

We have a holiday coming up in the October week which we could really do with the tax rebate back for. To be safe I checked with the person who told me I was due the refund how long it would take from them receiving my paperwork to me getting a cheque and was told six weeks.

I eventually managed to send the info off in the middle of August so allowing for six weeks everything should be dealt with by the end of September giving me time to clear the cheque and convert it to Euros. Or so I thought...

On the advice of someone else I phoned the tax office today to see how it was progressing and they informed me that, while my mail would have been opened, due to a backlog they were only actually processing mail they had received on the 19th of June at the moment. Now that was around the time that I first found out I was due a rebate so the person who quoted the six weeks would surely have been aware of a backlog.

I asked the person I spoke to today if there was any indication of how long until my mail would be processed and he said there was no way of knowing. So then I asked him if he could let me know how long from them starting to process it until I received a cheque, again he had no idea.

Feeling pretty annoyed I checked out the website to find out about their proposed target times. According to the website they should process 80% of their mail within 15 days and the 20% of people whose mail can't be processed within that time should receive a letter telling them why it can't be processed and when they should expect the matter resolved.

Finding this out just made me more annoyed so I called back to raise this issue and was told that because it was a busy period they could not meet this deadline. that is just ridiculous as it is now September and given that the busy period will have started in January when the self assessment returns had to start going in and the backlog is still over ten weeks it makes it virtually impossible to visualise exactly when they would be caught up sufficiently to meet the 15 day target that they have published on their website. Especially since when I asked the person I spoke to on the phone the second time round to give me an idea of when it would be dealt with she explained that eventually they would get round to processing my letter at which point it would be referred to the person who works out the payments, it would then be about two weeks until that person looked at it and made a decision. The decision would then be referred to their security department who would authorise the relevant people to send a cheque out. As such even if there was no backlog it would be impossible, as far as I can see, for them to meet their target.

I can't visualise any other walk of life where this sort of service would be acceptable. Roz works for a government agency who has targets imposed upon them. If they ever missed any of their target dates they would be in deep trouble. The only reason I can see that it isn't the same at the tax office is that if there are thousands of people in the same boat as me throughout the country then the Inland Revenue gets to hang onto the overpayment for six months longer than they should and make a sizeable chunk in interest off the back of it.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm really annoyed now.