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Hello,
I thought that I would share this tip:
The CMS currently won't allow you to contact them unless you meet one of their 5 criteria and typically make it as difficult as possible to get through to a human being as they can with the standard 12-week brush-off reply available via their online portal.
So this is what I did: having received one of their automatically generated letters demanding over £1200 pcm (regular payment c.£400) I wanted to contact them to tell them that they had made a mistake and to sort the problem out but they won't take phone queries regarding anything like this at the moment.
Given that I am self-employed and only pay myself £1k a month it would be ridiculous to carry on working in this scenario. I therefore told them that I was receiving no income, had no work and was unemployed, which I would have been if they were insisting on collecting this incorrect amount as I would have been generating a debt every time I paid them - what a ridiculous situation! When they asked 'when did this unemployment start?' I replied '30 seconds ago' which seemed to do the trick and they put me through to someone to speak with who actually sorted the problem quite efficiently in the end and remarkably admitted that they had made a mistake! Wonders never cease....
If I hadn't have done this then they would have taken up to 12 weeks to reply and I would have had to pay them more than I was earning.
Good luck!
nice. when i rang them and told them am out of work, they told me i must shut my company down to prove i am no longer receiving income from it :p
someone else told me i need proof to show i am no longer self-employed. sent some doc about me de-registering for vat, and emails from accountant stating that they are no longer reporting a monthly income to HMRC. that worked. their online portal is not bad. even though they mention 12 weeks turnaround, they been replying to me within 2-3 days.
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