Disappointment for thousands of Norfolk County Council employees as their recent tax rebates have to be repaid to HMRC. The reason… a corrupted computer file, which made it appear that the entire council staff had been taxed a month more than they had worked. The council submit monthly returns to the tax office, but the March documents were corrupted so HMRC never received the necessary information for that month.
As John Birchall, of Norfolk County Council, explains, “The system then started to generate automatically these cheques that people have now been receiving.” He got one of the false tax rebate cheques himself and confirmed that so did “probably the majority of employees”.
These unfortunate taxpayers now have the option of returning the cheques with their P60s or having the rebate come out of their upcoming pay packets. Head teacher of Buxton Primary School, Deborah Leahy, described it as “deflating” to her staff when she told them about the mistake after receiving the council’s explanatory email.
Just as you’ve got excited about some unexpected extra cash and decided on using it to redecorate the hall or as holiday money, you get told it was never yours in the first place. What a disappointment! All thanks to a computer “glitch” and ‘system errors’.
