1. Joint claim in 2003. Overpayment as annual declaration not returned in 2004. Client consistently maintains it was never received and she knew nothing about such returns. There is clearly a possibility it was lost in the post, but the Helpline say a separate copy of return was sent to each claimant in separate envelopes; also they may have had separate reminders before the 30.9.04 deadline.

I thought the reminders were introduced later & not sent in 2004. Can anyone with a better memory than me confirm this please? Also, is it correct that the annual return was sent separately to each claimant in 2004, or was that only introduced later?

2. In July 2003 claimants income was altered, & husband was then shown as nil income but working 37 hours per week (wife's details were correct). I've a vague recollection of seeing something about a computer problem at TCO which caused these erroneous nil income situations. Am I right please, and can anyone give any more details about it.

On point 2, there were two income issues.

The first sounds like the situation you describe. When someone called to change one income, if the operator didn't re-enter the second person's income (even if no change) it defaulted to nil. So in this case, the operator should have re-entered the husband's income even though there was no change.

The second income problem cropped up around May - August 2004 (slightly later than you are looking at) and involved nil incomes again, but this time the award notices actually showed the correct income and it was only the actual calculation that used the Nil income. We have had success in getting these sorts of cases written off as obviously even if they checked the award notice the error couldn't be spotted (unless you could work out the actual calculation which of course is unreasonable for a claimant).

The first problem has always been harder to argue against if the award notice that was sent showed the nil income. In most of the cases I have seen, HMRC have always admitted the error, but then said the claimant failed to meet their responsibilities by not checking the award notice and informing HMRC of the error.

Victoria