Council Tax - collection failure

Back in March, Mr Mustard blogged about the new Council tax system - he observed that, following a chat with one of his neighbours, he had the suspicion that a number of Council Tax bills had not been issued at all.

I expect you will recall that a number of bills were issued twice

original story in the local Times paper

and now Mr Mustard has confirmation that a number of bills were not issued at all, and some have possibly still not been issued but the answer cannot currently be established. Software problems don't you know.

The first rule of credit control, Mr Mustard's specialist subject, is that if you don't send an invoice out it won't get paid. Now this may seem like absolute commonsense to you dear reader but then your brain isn't full of that fluffy OneBarnet nonsense that leaves no room for day to day rational thinking. 

So 138,424 bills should have been issued.

Only 128,380 bills were issued by 31 March 2011 ( that is just under 93% of them )

So that's 10,044 bills not sent out on time. At an average band charge ( D ) of £1,423 that could be £14million of cash flow in jeopardy.

The Council won't know for 2 more weeks how many bills have still not been sent out.

Sadly, many of the ones that have not been issued relate to benefit claimants. Those are the very bills which should be sorted out on time because the affected people, by virtue of their status of being benefit claimants, won't have spare cash with which to catch up with any arrears that build up that they don't know about.

So there we are: "OneBarnet - NoBrain"

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Nick Walkley