Grandmother asks tax office for her £33 back and gets £1.5m

A pensioner owed a £33 rebate after a tax office blunder was stunned to get a cheque for £1,511,533.80. Elizabeth Jenkins, 86, had phoned HM Revenue and Customs after noticing they had wrongly taken £33 from her account and they promised to send a refund.

She had not had it six months later so she phoned again and was told a cheque had been sent - and cashed. Records showed it had been sent to "J. O'Brien" at the wrong address so officials promised to send another cheque. But Mrs Jenkins, a widowed mother-of-two, was stunned when a cheque for £1,511,533.80 landed on her doormat.



The retired civil servant from Bournemouth, Dorset, has not cashed it - but despite more calls to the tax office has still not had one for the correct amount. She said: "I'm sure that if the roles were reversed and I had owed them money for over a year I'd probably be in jail now. They would hound me and hound me until I paid it back. So I'm going to hound them."

An HMRC spokesman said: "We handle huge numbers of tax repayments and unfortunately things sometimes go wrong. When they do we apologise and sort things out as quickly as possible."