CCM16590 - Enquiries: Penalty cases: Amending the award

You should begin the process of amending the award which must be carried out in 3 stages.

Stage 1 - The day after the letter has been issued to the claimant you should save the screen print to casebook for each year covered by the enquiry (including the CY if there is a recovery for that year) before the amendment is made.

The screen prints for enquiry years (or any years involving a discovery) will show the position at finalisation before the amendment is made. The screen print for a CY will show the latest in-year position. Although you will be inviting a contract settlement to include overpaid credits where there is no ongoing entitlement this will not normally include the overpayment arising as a result of the S18 decision. The reason for this is that the tax credit system will possibly have recovered part or all of this overpayment by the time you come to make the subsequent amendment.

Stage 2 - You should then revise the awards for all relevant years. It is important that this action is not taken until the TCC94 letter has been issued to the claimant so they are aware of the need to ignore the messages regarding the recovery of the overpayments. Where adjustments are needed for more than one year you should start with the earliest year and then work through the adjustments always remembering to adjust an earlier year before a later one.

Stage 3 - Two days after the award has been amended you should take further screen prints for each year to show the revised position. If the system has not been updated to show the revisions you should continue to monitor this on a daily basis until the revisions have been implemented. The screen prints should now show a figure of overpaid credits for the enquiry years. The position for a CY will depend on the nature of the adjustments made. Having taken the screen prints you must then calculate the amount of the overpayment which will be included in your contract settlement and use Make Remission to remit this amount. It is important that at least 2 days are allowed to lapse after the issue of the revised award before any attempt is made to use Make Remission otherwise the system may not reflect the correct overpayment.

For the CY you should only use Make Remission where the overpayment is recoverable in-year (see CCM8125 and CCM8126) and will be included in the contract settlement.

Some examples of how to calculate the amount to be remitted and included in the contract settlement are shown at

CCM14260 where there is a continuing award

CCM14265 where there is no continuing award as a result of a compliance check

CCM14268 where there is no continuing award due to another reason.

You should then revise the awards for all relevant years. It is important that this action is not taken until the TCC94 letter has been issued to the claimant so they are aware of what will happen next. Where adjustments are needed for more than one year you should start with the earliest year and then work through the adjustments always remembering to adjust an earlier year before a later one. Once amendments have been made to all relevant years you will need to issue an interest stencil for each year covered by an enquiry or a discovery decision - see CCM14155. Then proceed as in c. below.

Once you have issued the revised awards BF your papers for 40 days to allow for the appeal period.