Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

We have a claimant who has had a change to her tax credits.Due to a change in her income and personal circumstances, she now gets a small amount of child and working tax credit.
So small ( around £1.00 a week) that the Inland Revenue have decided to pay her with a one off payment for both child and WTC from Sept to the end of the year.
Normally, one off payments count as capital and are disregarded, but what about a one off payment which is simply paying all the entitlement due till the end of the year as one payment rather than make minute weekly payments?
Do we still disregard that?

[Kevin D]

I’ll take a punt….

Two options:

1) [b:3b7dcb1efc]HBR 32(3)(a)[/b:3b7dcb1efc] allows for daily instalments. I can’t see any other option as far as [u:3b7dcb1efc]income[/u:3b7dcb1efc] is concerned….

2) treat as capital. Er, no idea of the legal basis for this one… 😕 But, common sense really really appeals on this…. Sadly, as Cmmr Jacobs pointed out in CH/0858/2006, regs don’t refer to common sense.

If the payments had been almost any other form of income, it would have to be attributable to the period it is/was in respect of.

Regards

[Darren Broughton]

I posed the same question to the DWP a year or two ago –

[i:8258a896c1][u:8258a896c1]Query[/u:8258a896c1]

Regulation 10 of the Tax Credits (Payments by the Board) Regulations 2002 provides for the one-off payment of tax credit for the whole period of the award where the entitlement is less than £2.00 per week.
What do we do when annual CTC or WTC entitlement is paid in one lump sum because weekly entitlement is less than £2.00?
I right in thinking that we would treat the payment as a ‘one off’ and so disregard as income altogether?

[u:8258a896c1]DWP Answer[/u:8258a896c1]

There is provision in regulations to treat daily, weekly and monthly paid tax credits as income but there is no provision to treat annually paid amounts. Therefore, this would be treated as capital provided it is less than £2 a week.

Lucy Da Silva
Housing Support Division
5th Floor, Adelphi.[/i:8258a896c1]

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