HMRC gave a refund from my tax account to fraudster making repayment claim | Tax

Since January I have received numerous letters from HM Revenue and customs stating I owe £2,500 plus interest. My accountant and I wrote to HMRC explaining that my tax bill is paid in full, but received no response. Since then, I have been pursued by a debt collector.

EF, London

HMRC told me that in January they received a phone call requesting payment of overpaid tax into your self-assessment account.

He blithely paid the money as instructed by the caller, then later realized that the call was from a fraudster who had pretended to be you and pocketed the money.

This caused your tax account to go into arrears – hence the £2,500 demands that HMRC had handed out.

HMRC insisted that the fraudster had used personal information “obtained elsewhere”.

This is an extraordinary situation for many reasons: refunds can be activated over the phone; that HMRC, notorious for its diabolical communications, even answered the phone; that the check appears to have been sent to the fraudster rather than to your address; and that she was able to establish a posteriori that the call was fraudulent, which suggests that anomalies were present and missed. And he never thought to inform you that you had been scammed.

In June, HMRC announced that criminals had stolen £47 million by accessing the tax accounts of 100,000 people to make false refund claims.

The Treasury committee criticized him for failing to inform Parliament or the public. I have repeatedly highlighted the ease with which false rebates can be granted and paid on behalf of unwitting taxpayers.

HMRC has denied your experience is linked to the £47m heist. You use an accounting firm to manage your taxes. It turns out 13 of the company’s other customers are also being prosecuted after refunds of £2,500 were similarly fraudulently claimed. The company informed HMRC of your case in March, but received only a bland response.

It seems possible that fraudsters may have hacked into the company’s IT system or obtained sensitive data via phishing emails.

You only heard about HMRC after I spoke. It explained that your tax account showed a credit for five days in January between the time you made your first installment payment for the last tax year and the finalization of your account. The scammer jumped into this little window and made off with £2,500 of that credit, leaving you with a shortfall.

In their letter to you, HMRC linked your experience to the wider issue of refund fraud they had identified, although they assured me it was unrelated.

A spokesperson told me: “We have contacted EF and his agent to apologize and confirm that we have updated his file to show that he does not owe this money.”

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