24 June 2011

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


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

2 comments:

  1. Mr Reasonable has just emailed me as he has technical issues in adding this comment

    "This is utterly shocking and someone needs to be held responsible. £14 million unbilled is utterly unacceptable and yet again a software problem seems to be at the heart of it.

    Well done!

    Kind regards

    Mr Reasonable"

    ReplyDelete
  2. i hope this could be failure of management which is unable to retain taxes at all.


    Irvine Tax relief

    ReplyDelete

I now moderate comments in the light of the Delfi case. Due to the current high incidence of spam I have had to turn word verification on.