By Ian Pollock
Personal finance reporter, BBC News
A stray pen mark on a tax credit application form has trapped a couple
from South London in a Kafkaesque nightmare for more than three years.
Sanna Wennberg and some of her tax credit forms
Franz Kafka's famous novel, The Trial, features a character called Josef K.
One day he wakes up and is then arrested and tried for a crime.
But his mysterious prosecutors will not tell him what he has done wrong.
....
The claim
Sanna is an architect and her husband Guy is a self-employed writer.
The mark, on the second box, may have caused the trouble.
They first started to claim working families tax credit (as it was then
called) back in December 2002.
Money started to come in from the summer of 2003.
Then in February 2004, for the first time, a formal award notice
arrived, telling them they were entitled to nearly £10,000 a year for
2003-04.
Suspicious about the size of the award, they also noticed two apparent
errors.
cont'd....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6358105.stm