He said: “Before I left, the lady in the council tax office gave me my remaining balance when I called, which I paid then and there by debit card. When I got the letter, I thought it was just the confirmation that I had paid the original outstanding balance in full. But when I saw the balance and it was still asking for 2p I was astonished. My first reaction was to laugh out loud. My fiancée Karen came over to see what was wrong and was speechless when she saw the demand. She said ‘you’re not seriously going to pay this?’
“It would probably cost me three or four dollars to send the cheque over to them. What a terrible waste of money, especially when you bear in mind the measures the Government is making to save money. I shudder to think what it cost the district council to process this demand – it is absolutely silly and a gross waste of public money. I have sent the council an e-mail to say that I think it is ridiculous that they have gone to the expense of rebilling me in New Zealand. Am I expected to take this letter seriously?”
A district council spokesman said: “The 2p bill was automatically generated by the computer system and was spotted on an exception report. The account was corrected within a few days of it taking place. We have confirmed by e-mail to Mr King that the 2p has been removed from the account and apologised to the customer. Clearly asking payment for such a very small amount is nonsensical and not cost effective wherever anyone lives. We have an automated process to deal with small balances which has failed in this case. We are now reviewing this process to find out what has gone wrong and prevent it happening again in the future.”
3 comments:
Something similar happened to us. My husband went over his bank account by 43 cents. It cost them $2.50 to send us a registered letter. We had two other bank accounts there that they could have taken it from, but they chose to close this account. Husband talked to them and they reopen the account. So he is writing checks, and then starts receiving notices of bounced checks. The bank forgot to inform the check processing center that they had reopened the account. They had to pay for every single bounced checked. It was quite substantial. All for 43 cents.
Same here! I got the close-out amount for my bank account over the phone. Wrote myself a check to transfer it to the new place and that should have been it. A month later I get a bill from my old bank saying that I have to pay a $50 fee for having too little in my account (that should be closed!) Turns out that the amount they gave me was 10 cents off so it didn't shut it down. After having to make the case that there's no sane reason anyone would do that on purpose they waived the fee and closed it for me. For legal reasons they had to send me a check for the 10 cents though. ARGH! Such a waste of time any money.
In a similar vein, I recently paid off a balance on a credit card account, and the next month I was billed a few cents for interest between the time of the calculation of the payoff amount and due-by date. This is a type of billing error that goes back at lest 50 years. So I deliberately overpaid this new billing by 50 cents or so, so that the card company will have to send me a statement every month telling me that I have a credit balance. Wonder if they'll ever tire of it and send me a check.
Lurker111
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