Penny fails to drop in tax quiz

Jan 11 2008 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

KIRKLEES Council has revealed it doesn’t know how many council tax bills for less than £1 it sends out.

The Examiner asked for the information in November after carrying the story of Paul Rayner.

Kirklees apologised to the Mount man after sending him a council tax bill for 1p.

Finally, the council responded to the Examiner’s Freedom of Information Act enquiry asking how many council tax bills for less than £1 had been produced.

Kirklees Council’s revenues and benefits spokesman, Chris Read, said: “Our records show we produced 4,990 council tax bills for less than £1 in the last three full financial years.

“To put this figure into context, we have produced 1.3m bills in total over this period.”

But he said Kirklees didn’t know how many of these 4,990 bills had actually been sent out.

Mr Read said: “Our normal procedure is to undertake a manual removal of printed bills of less than £1 but, as the process is manual, we do not hold any record of the number that we have removed over the past three years.”

He added that bills for small amounts are usually rolled forward to the next year.

Mr Read said: “Low balance outstanding accounts are normally held until the following year’s council tax is due, and then added to the new year’s balance.”

But he said there are times when Kirklees has to send out a bill – even if it is only for 1p.

Mr Read said: “While we manually remove some penny council tax bills, there are some that we must issue.

“These include council tax bills issued at the start of the financial year and bills that have been reduced by benefit. In these cases we have to notify the customer of their revised balance and give them assurance that their account has been credited with benefit.”