FOI request (FOIR-364546024)

Council Tax Overpayments

Requested Tue 21 September 2021
Responded  Tue 05 October 2021

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from this council. Please may you provide me with:

The total number of people who are (knowingly to the council) overpaying on their council tax and the total monetary figure of these unclaimed amounts between January 2016 and January 2021.

Please provide the information in the form of a spreadsheet or simple table categorised by the reason for overpayment - split by year between January 2016 and January 2021 and the total number of people plus the total monetary figure per category. The categorisations for the reasons for overpayment are listed:

1. Overpayment due to Exemptions/Discounts

2. Overpayment due to Band Changes

3. Overpayment due to Leaving the Borough

4. Overpayment due to Other Reasons

Response

It is not possible to provide all the information required or in the way requested due to how our system keeps the information.

We have been able to do the following:

You have requested figures between January 2016 and January 2021, however, we are in financial years so we have information for financial years 2016 to 2021.

Total number of accounts in credit: 5,408, Total amount of credits: £846,186.01, broken down as follows:

2016: 506 - £60,801.09

2017: 552 - £61,876.28

2018: 569 - £64,938.90

2019: 577 - £78,463.62

2020: 1,481 - £219,362.56

2021: 1,723 - £360,743.56

It is not possible to break down the amounts into the categories stated in 1-4.