Tax Credit Office - Identity Theft - has anyone come across this

I work for a medium sized employer based in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey.

Several of our staff have received a letter from the Tax Credit Office headed "Safeguarding your personal details".

The letter goes on to say that the Tax Credit Office have identified and stopped an attempt to claim tax credits using some personal details (although the letter does not reveal what personal details have been used).

The letter states that it is not possible to say how the details were obtained and recommends that the person registers with CIFAS (a fraud prevention service).

Naturally, as an employer we are worried as to how this information has been obtained and whether or not we are in anyway responsible for the leak.

Despite telephone calls to the Tax Credit Office and to our PAYE district I have not been able to speak to anyone who seems to know very much about this. No-one is able to give me a telephone number of someone who can answer what I think is a pretty obvious question, namely, “is this just our employees or is it happening nationwide?”

During my most recent call to the Tax Credit Helpline, I was advised that they can not give me the phone number of the person at HMRC who wrote the most recent example of this. It seems that the Helpline staff are not provided with phone numbers (presumably so that they can’t give them out to people to prevent people calling someone who might be able to give them an answer).

All I have been given is a fax number for a data protection department in Newcastle but the very helpful team leader to whom I spoke wasn’t terribly optimistic that the recipient of my fax would be able to help.

Does this experience sound familiar to any one?

Has it happened to other organizations employees, did you manage to identify the cause and does anyone have a name and phone number of someone in HMRC who might be able to help us find out more?

Valerie Murrell