TCM0284280 - Specialist areas - Complex: Complex cases - manual renewal payments (Info)

Note: From 6 April 2017, customers will only get the Family Element of Child Tax Credit where they are responsible for a child or children born before that date.

Note: The individual child element of Child Tax Credit will no longer be awarded for third and subsequent children or qualifying young persons in a household, born on or after 6 April 2017, unless it meets the exception criteria.

Note: If you are dealing with a claim where an exception marker has been applied to any of the children/young persons included in the claim or the customer is reporting a change relating to an exception contact the Exception Team (This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) . (This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) For how to check if the exception marker has been applied, use TCM1000314.

Complex cases will be dealt with by a specialist team in the Tax Credit Office (TCO).

Complex cases will be cases where

  • the family has more than 18 children
    or
  • polygamous or polyandrous marriages.

Cases which are also considered to be complex and will be dealt with by TCO, Northern Ireland (NI) are

  • cross-border
  • family supplement
  • crown servants serving outside the United Kingdom (UK).

Cross-border and crown servant cases are where the customer either works and/or lives outside of the UK but within the European Union (EU).

Note: The above list is not exhaustive.

From 06/04/2004, provisional payments were made on these cases and the payments issued to the customer were recorded on a Manual Provisional Payments proforma. Once the renewal action has been completed, you must follow this process in order to make the correct payments to the customers, taking into account any overpayments. Payments will then be manually made and an accounting record will be kept.

If, after starting to recover an overpayment by cross year (this is where an overpayment is recovered in-year by reducing the amount of tax credits the customer will receive), entitlement ends, then the overpayment will be left until the end of year finalisation. This is in case the customer has another successful claim for tax credits within the tax year and then cross-year recovery can resume. If there is not another claim for tax credits then the overpayment left will be added to any overpayment from year 2004-2005 and recovered directly from the customer.

If the customer notifies a change of circumstances at a later date, you will have to implement the change of circumstances then reapply the recovery percentage if there’s an overpayment to the new award amount. Some of the overpayment will have already been recovered, so you will need to calculate how much has been recovered up to the change of circumstance taking place and take this from the amount now left to be recovered.

The first part of the process for calculating the entitlement and renewing the claim and the last part of the process for drafting and issuing the award letters giving the details of the payments including any recovery is dealt with in guidance TCM0284240.

There is an Action Guide for this subject, select TCM0284300 to access it