Skip to main content

Tax Credit Clawbacks

There was a quite reasonable statement from the Paymaster General (Dawn Primorolo) about Tax Credits today.

The problem is that if you have a responsive system which changes as people's incomes go up and down then you will end up with some overpayment. These overpayments may from time to time need recovering. There needs, therefore, to be a system for this.

The problem with this is that the government merely take the money out of people's bank accounts and wait for them to complain. Many households are very marginal from a cash flow perspective and cannot afford this.

What the government should do is agree the repayment rate before clawing back the money. I have written a letter (follows) to the Paymaster General to call for this.

Letter to Dawn Primorolo
I understand that currently you are stopping clawback if a dispute is raised.

Would it not be better to only claw back when the recipient has agreed the clawback rate?

Hardship is caused when the clawback rate is too high. At the moment monies are taken directly out of people’s bank accounts. This can cause massive problems for domestic cashflow. Rather than take the money off people until they claim it would be better to get the agreement first then take action.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trudiagnostic change PACE leaderboard algorithm - was in position 40, now position 44 - does it matter?

Trudiagnostic have changed the way they handle the Rejuvenation Olympics Leaderboard algorithm. The result of this initially was that I was globally no 40 and have now dropped to 44. Trudiagnostic are a US company that get samples of blood and they look at the DNA to see which parts of the DNA have methyl groups (CH3) attached to them. These modifications to DNA are called methylation markers. DunedinPACE is an algorithm which uses DNA methylation markers in white blood cells to work out how quickly or slowly someone is aging. I had three results on this. The odd thing about the results was that whilst my epigenetic age calculated from the same methylation markers was going down, the speed at which I was aging was going up. I find this somewhat counterintuitive. It is, however, I think relevant that in a global contest my approach on biochemistry which is quite different to many other people's does seem to keep up with others working in the same area. To that extent it...