Plans to introduce new powers that would allow H M Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to take money directly from people\u2019s accounts has hit a fresh wave of protests, after it was revealed that it might be used to reclaim money miss-paid to people receiving tax credits.<\/p>\n
According to figures released under a freedom of information request made by campaign group False Economy, the department plans to seize money from around 3,000 people\u2019s bank accounts each year in order to recover overpayments of tax credits.<\/p>\n
But the information released show that this might affect vulnerable people, who might not have the means to pay it back.<\/p>\n
This has led to the proposal being criticised by tax professionals, lawyers and charities and seen the creation of a petition calling for it to be withdrawn, which has already attracted 2,350 signatures.<\/p>\n
Speaking in the Independent Gillian Guy, Chief Executive at Citizens Advice, said: \u201cHMRC has a poor track record in managing people’s data and dealing with overpayments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe safeguards look sensible but with such huge pressure on household budgets, it does not take much to push families into financial trouble and mistakes by HMRC will be harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response HMRC said that tax credits overpayment debt represents just over 2 per cent of the \u00a3255bn paid out in tax credits since 2003.<\/p>\n
It went on to say that the majority of overpayments occurred when customers failed to tell them about a change in circumstances and that they would only recover tax credits overpayments where it is possible to do so and that they would always leave \u00a35,000 behind to cover essential expenses and prevent hardship.<\/p>\n
The new Direct recovery of Debts powers are designed to strengthen HMRC powers to recover tax and tax credit debts directly from bank and building society accounts, including ISAs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plans to introduce new powers that would allow H M Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to take money directly from people\u2019s accounts has hit a fresh wave of protests, after it was revealed that it might be used to reclaim money miss-paid to people receiving tax credits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}