Child Tax Credit
Not the council, but HMRC. What an absolute shower of cnuts they are.

All families with an income of less than a huge amount are entitled to claim Child Tax Credit. The amount awarded is on a sliding scale according to income, but the minimum payment is around £42 per month.

The jokers at the HMRC wrote to me a few years ago to advise me of my annual award. They informed me that as I had 0 children, my new award for the year would be £0. I phoned them to announce my shock at this, as I most certainly left 2 children having their breakfast with their mother not an hour previously.

They apologised, and said that it was an error due to them moving onto a new computer system. I would be issued with a new award statement.

I was. It said the same fecking thing. And the next one, and the next.

I finally manage to make a breakthrough, and they decide to issue us, on a monthly basis, a manually raised Giro. They've apparently given up trying to tell the system that I have 2 kids, so they have to raise a payment manually instead. Every month. Christ knows how many others are in the same boat, but I'm guessing it's thousands. Somewhere there is an army of drones manually raising Giros because 'The computa sez no'.

Oh yes, one other point. They still owe us the whopping total of £545 for an entire year of payments. Apparently manual payments cannot be issued retrospectively for an entire year's worth of payments. They've now owed us this for 3 years.

Meanwhile I know that my tax bill, from the very same people, will be shortly dropping through the door demanding payment within 28 days, or they'll chop my bollocks off.

As I said, cnuts.
(Reverend Fister "a disciplined fuckwit", Wed 1 Aug 2007, 9:43, Reply)