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Where Taxpayers and Advisers Meet

Unusual name problem

someone
Posts:691
Joined:Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:09 am
Unusual name problem

Postby someone » Wed Aug 04, 2021 5:37 pm

Wild attempt to see if anybody has any ideas how to move this forward.

I am married (since 2017) but my wife has kept her maiden name and has never, ever, used my surname on anything (and doesn't intend to)

Shortly after getting married we made a joint CGT PPR election. Unfortunately, HMRC updated my wifes surname unprompted.

My wife and I have made many attempts to get her name sorted out but we are failing miserably. My wife has now had her topup to her LISA refused because her details don't match what HMRC have.

HMRC won't talk to her because her details don't match what they have and they want evidence of her name change (how do you provide evidence of something that has never happened?)

(I didn't know this until today but apparently she cannot get a pension forecast either because her details don't match)

We've been trying to get this put right for over four years now. I've suggested trying our MP as the next thing to do but can anyone else suggest anything else?

She cannot even change the name on her LISA to my name as she has absolutely nothing with my name on it (and I don't think she should be forced into changing the name she uses if she doesn't want to)

robbob
Posts:3228
Joined:Wed Aug 06, 2008 4:01 pm

Re: Unusual name problem

Postby robbob » Thu Aug 05, 2021 8:12 am

Hello someone

Thats annoying , for us as agets for individuals with UTR's we simply go in and change. If she has UTR she might be able to change her name within her online gateway.

all you can do is keep badgering hmrc till they relent - complianig as you go.

Perhaps making a gdpr compaint might have the best affect


My beef would be with the hmrc department that caused the chnage so if its clearly after form submissiom write to head of that department raising formal complaint.

This should be right the street of your MP - or if hmrc have a twietter feed suitably embarrasing tweet may suffice.

Web chat or helpline worth trying too if you can get through.

someone
Posts:691
Joined:Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:09 am

Re: Unusual name problem

Postby someone » Thu Aug 05, 2021 3:58 pm

Thank you! The GDPR (and a subject access request) sound like excellent things to try.

One of the the problem is that there are 16 possible combinations of title, surname and address that they could have on record for her. We suspect that their records for NI and their records for income tax differ too.

A SAR where we list all 16 possible "names + addresses" they might have information under so we can find out what they have where might be enough to help get through on telephone and get it corrected once we know what they currently have.

Interestingly, when we "flipped" our PPR recently, they gratuitously changed my postal address to the flipped address but didn't change hers and left it unchanged. And that was a single letter for both of us.

robbob
Posts:3228
Joined:Wed Aug 06, 2008 4:01 pm

Re: Unusual name problem

Postby robbob » Thu Aug 05, 2021 4:07 pm

We suspect that their records for NI and their records for income tax differ too.
That would make complete sense and i wouldn't necessarily preume hmrc are totally at fault if historic info is present other than it would be useful if they did a notify once we will update all system but they don't

Interestingly, when we "flipped" our PPR recently, they gratuitously changed my postal address to the flipped address but didn't change hers and left it unchanged. And that was a single letter for both of us.
all i would say is lesson learned and incldue extra caveats about what to update and not to update so its explicit - then if they mess up you have something to refer back to.
Unfortunately it often ends up like chiesne whispers where its 35 kids and they are each 3 years of age -

someone
Posts:691
Joined:Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:09 am

Re: Unusual name problem

Postby someone » Thu Aug 05, 2021 5:41 pm

all i would say is lesson learned and incldue extra caveats about what to update and not to update so its explicit - then if they mess up you have something to refer back to.
Unfortunately it often ends up like chiesne whispers where its 35 kids and they are each 3 years of age -
You'd think so - but unfortunately one of the things that seems to have made it worse is that on our PPR flip recently I explicitly said not to change her name as she has never used my surname. Unfortunately, that seems to have triggered them to change something (possibly changing something back I guess), but we're not sure what, because the LISA topup details mismatch is new for this year.

For as long as we've been married she's used one name, one address and one title. We do have two residences (neighbouring flats). We completed on the second one (our main address from completion) three months after we were married.

We've even speculated that she might have been issued with a second NINO. We don't think so but it's impossible to be sure. We're reasonably confident that her DOB hasn't been changed.
But all we know for the LISA topup failure is that at least one of name, address, NINO and DOB don't match. She does have a UTR and her information looks correct when she logs in via that.

someone
Posts:691
Joined:Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:09 am

Re: Unusual name problem

Postby someone » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:22 am

Hello someone

Thats annoying , for us as agets for individuals with UTR's we simply go in and change. If she has UTR she might be able to change her name within her online gateway.

all you can do is keep badgering hmrc till they relent - complianig as you go.

Perhaps making a gdpr compaint might have the best affect
We believe it's sorted - four years after we think it went wrong and after two years of trying to get it put right!

I started with a subject access request. While my particular and directed request appears to have been ignored and they just sent a "standard NI response", it does seem that that has caused them to change at least some things. It's really hard to make sense of what they've sent but they clearly have (according to the trail of previous addresses) updated her address as a result of my SAR (the date of the change is the date of my request) despite it saying "we were told about this address in 2018" (her first tax return after we moved) at the top where it has her current address!

They may also have removed my name from her record because it doesn't appear *anywhere* in the 100 pages of information that they sent.

However, that *still* didn't fix things. When she logged on her national insurance letter, national insurance record, and state pension forecast still had my name on it!

But now having filled in the forms for me to do a SAR for her I assumed I would now be able to ring up on her behalf to fix it - they insisted on talking to her to go through security, but miracles of miracles, she could now pass the security checks. (At a guess it was the address that was wrong)

The first call (Monday) something was changed on her record but after the "wait 24 hours" it still wasn't fixed.

Second call, yesterday, I got to speak to a very helpful Andrew, who understood what the problem was, wasn't surprised that the three things that were wrong were all wrong, was able to completely remove my name from her record and now seems to be completely fixed :-)

Her next task is to ask her lisa provider to reapply for the top-up.

Special thanks to robbob for the clue about the gdpr complaint. Although we didn't get that far, starting on that trail by trying to find out what was actually wrong so we could get it corrected seems to have been the nudge that was needed to get it fixed.

And a suggestion for anyone making a CGT main residence election - be absolutely clear in the letter that names and addresses must not be changed as a result of the election. We think that was the trigger that caused things to change for NI (but not tax!) - but because we didn't know anything had changed she couldn't pass the security checks to get it fixed!

(And I've now got to check my NI record for those bits because I guess I might have a wrong address too - it's right on my tax reference - but it was on hers too)


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