Child Tax Credit has mess up my claim ans have stopped payments

[seanamarts]

I will try and make this as brief as possible,

15 year old niece has come to live with me, places a claim for ctc and chb

as from the 30th May 09.

Both have all info needed, chb took 12 weeks to complete all back dated no problems, now get full housing benefit.

CTC takes 4 and a half months to get sorted, only back pays 8 weeks, asked for an appeal to get all 20 weeks back dated, that is owed and was told it would.

Today I am informed that they have stopped the CTC over a week ago, didnt notice until bank statement came today. Some one has mistakenly put back my claim to the beginning of April instead of the end of may, have not been paid any of this money either but they have still stopped my CTC whilst they deal with this.

1, Can they stop my claim for their mistake

2, I have not been over paid in fact I am almost 400 pounds underpaid.

3, Is there anything I can do about this to get this money reinstated, I have been informed by CTC that it could take weeks to sort out

[TCman]

1. Yes they can stop the claim if they made a mistake i'm afraid. It sounds like your claim has been terminated

2. The overpayment they are advising of will be due to the fact that the claim has been terminated. The overpayment itself shoudl disappear after the claim is reinstated.

3. If CTC have incorrectly terminated your claim, they should have sent a M1 (other), its an internal request to have a claim reinstated. These request can take a while to go through.

If the claim was terminated due to their error you may be entitled to manual payments. Speak to the helpline to see if they can arrange that for you. If they are unable to, then possibly a visit to your closest tax enquiry centre to request an emergency payment may help.

[seanamarts]

Terminated !! Would this mean I have to start a new claim ? The last one took 4 and a half months to get sorted. Im still owed over £400.00 back payments. They certainly have incorrectly terminated my claim. I will get back on to them today to request manual payments as this is absolutely ridiculous. If it wasnt for the fact that I get DLA I would have had to of put my niece into care as I would not be able to afford her to stay with me, the whole reason why she is with me was to keep her out of the care system. in the first place.

They have cocked this up from the very start and still they cannot get it right, is there anyone that I can complain to this about.

Many thanks for your reply by the way

[TCman]

The m1 they should have sent should mean that you do not have to reapply again. The M1 team will...if they can. Put the claim back into payment.

You can make a complaint to the tax credit processing office. As it seems to be a processing error, my advice would be to contact the tax credit helpline and ask for the address for making a complaint against the processing team.

The helpline can log a complaint for you, but that means having to go through a longer process. Agent--->Team Leader---->Complaints manager (who will nopt be able to deal with it and need to pass it on to the processing team. The complainst manager can take up to 15 days to do this)

Best advice is to get the address and write to them yourself. If you are unhappy with the response you get you can then go to the Ombudsman.

[seanamarts]

Thanks for that, I have called them again yesterday to see what was happening and some one from the management team called me back a few hours later, they apologized for their error and have requested an emergency reinstatement which can take up to 4 weeks and all back dated payments will be issued at the same time. It was a computor glitch so I am told. many thanks for your help on this.... lets hope thois is case closed

[TCman]

Remember if you are in financial trouble you can get an emergency payment from your local tax office. Normally approved by the manager there. Its normally about £50. But if your stuck it might help

[seanamarts]

yes i did enquire about that and they agreed to pay out until my claim had been sorted, how ever it did mean that at the end of the tax year it would be classed as an over payment they also said that it could complicate matters further, so decided to wait, they have passed it through as urgent and should hear something at the end of next week, if i havnt then i am to call them and see what is holding it up