It's their fault but you must pay up

Hard working families that were wrongly overpaid tax credits, because of admistrative cock-ups will have to pay back the money.

Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) stated that the reason for this decision is that the families themsleves are at fault for not noticing the overpayment errors.

The computer errors the have dogged HMRC resulted in over 600,000 families receiving too much money. But only a fraction of those have been successful in stopping HMRC's attempts to claw back the money. Hundreds of thousands of families are now facing having to repay large sums, often thousands of pounds, despite their pleas of innocence.

To use as a defence that "the families should have noticed the error" is to put it quite simply a disgusting. These families simply filled in their claim form and sent it in, it was the HMRC that decided how much they should receive in tax credits. The reason for the families not knowing what they should have received, is that they do not know how HMRC calculate the credits.

So, if you don't know how it is calculated, how do you know if it is wrong? and how does that make it your fault?

This is a national disgrace, hard working families are being punished for a government department's cock-up.

Remember this at the next election!