Help! My HMRC tax records have been mixed up with a stranger’s: TONY HETHERINGTON investigates

Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.

Complex: The mix-up of personal details is like a scene from the 1995 movie The Net

Mrs E.M. writes: I received my National Insurance number when I was 16 and I am now 31. I have worked for the same employer for ten years. 

In 2019, my employer stopped deducting student loan payments from my earnings, saying they had been instructed to stop by the tax office as there was no such loan recorded under my details. 

I do in fact have a student loan, and the Student Loans Company managed to restart repayments, but the tax office again stopped them.

Tony Hetherington replies: If you thought the failure to collect loan repayments was bad, it did not take long for things to get much, much worse. Your earnings fell during the pandemic so no repayments were due, but when lockdown ended and your salary rose again last year, you tried to log on to the Revenue & Customs website but it refused to recognise you. You called the Revenue and were told your details were fine and not to bother them.

Then you registered with the Government Gateway website and uploaded your passport details. To your horror, up popped all your personal details – except that half of them were not your details at all.

Like Sandra Bullock in the movie The Net, someone else had been credited with lots of your details, while you were assigned their records. The name on the official account was your maiden name, though you were married in 2018. 

Your address and date of birth were correct. But the National Insurance number was not yours, and the records showed you had never once made a full year of contributions, putting your eventual state pension in jeopardy.

You complained and were told the tax man could not ‘uncouple’ the two lots of details and might have to give you a completely new National Insurance number.

Then you received a 12-page form, asking for details of every address you have lived at since you were 16, every job you have ever had, all your husband’s details, and all your parents’ details. This brings us up to last July, and since then, you told me, you have heard almost nothing more.

I asked officials at the Revenue head office to investigate. You were quickly called and told the matter was in hand. This was followed by a letter saying that your National Insurance records have now been separated from those of your doppelganger. You were offered £100 as an apology for the several years of stress.

But there was no statement for you to check, showing your National Insurance contributions, and the letter added: ‘There is still an issue with creating an online account. Unfortunately, at this time you are not able to create a personal tax account.’ Hardly reassuring.

You are expected to phone the Revenue if you need to make contact, and we all know how time consuming and costly that can be.

A Revenue spokesman told me: ‘We are continuing to work with Mrs M on reactivating her personal tax account and are taking steps to prevent errors like this affecting other customers in the future.’

Despite this, you have told me that the Student Loans Company is still experiencing gaps in the information it gets from the Revenue. And the £100 offer is derisory. It would not have bought you an hour of an accountant’s time, and you have been wrestling with the tax man for years.

On my advice, you are now complaining to the Revenue Adjudicator, the outside official who can step in when the tax man falls down. Let me know the result.

If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY or email [email protected]. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned. 

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk