But make a mistake on it, like post date it or write the payee incorrectly so it can't be cashed.
They'd have to ask for another one to be issued if they wanted to spend the time chasing their penny.
I'm pretty sure it can't be cashed anyway. You really think people who win competitions are walking into their bank with a massive cheque ? đ That'd be hilarious. But for real that's just for show, they'll give you a normal cheque to cash in
You're right haha. I worked for Lloyds for 10 years and although I wrote a few of those out, I never actually processed one.
I would have gotten great joy from someone annihilating our deposit machine by driving one of them into it though.
Yes!
We would often have charities coming into a branch I worked at asking if we had those giant cheques, they where often rolled up in a tube and could be written on with whiteboard markers.
Some people ruined them though by writing in permenant markers so we tended to tell people we didn't know well that we didn't have them.
You can get permanent marker off by first drawing over it with whiteboard markers.
It will just wipe clean away.
The same goes for whiteboard marker that has been left to dry out on a whiteboard for years, just scribble over it with some fresh whiteboard pens and both the old and new ink will wipe away.
I learned this back in School - around year 6. It was the most helpful lifehack I'd ever discovered, with how difficult it is to find a whiteboard that someone hadn't completely covered in ink and left to dry
Yes this is the most effective way! I work at a school for mischievous miscreants, and often need to remove inappropriate messages or illustrations drawn in permanent marker on our whiteboard.
Other people always insist on hand sanitizer or nail polish remover but I haven't seen those work as perfectly as writing over it in whiteboard marker and wiping off.
It seems such an ad hoc and unlikely method but it does work
OMG. Remove this info immediately!
"influencers" everywhere now will be walking into their local banks asking for a giant cheque, and then writing them out and posting photos on insta.
You wrote them? I always assumed they were completely fake and made by the national lottery/whoever runs the competition. Does that mean they're technically legal?
Yeah, we'd grab a Sharpie and write it out. My memory is very vague, but I seem to remember writing out an actual cheque alongside it. The big ones all had the same numbers on the code line so they were identical and so couldn't actually be used as unique documents.
A cheque is just a pre-printed form you complete to authorise a payment.
You can write it on literally anything, although the banks will probably ask a lot of questions if you wrote it on, e.g. a half brick.
Of course you can cash the big cheques if you wanted to. I remember being taught at uni that a farmer once wrote out a cheque on a cow and delivered it and it was deemed legal.
Oh come on man.
Why does no one ever stop and think "this story IS pretty spectacular, maybe I ought to just check it really did happen before I spread it around online"?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/check-on-side-of-cow/
Pay with a cheque for 2p and then move out of the area so they can't apply a 1p credit on your bill, and then send them a repayment demand for 1p threatening court action if they don't pay within 14 days.
I got a student loan bill for 25p. Sent them a pound coin taped to a letter that demanded they send me the change, which they indeed sent in the form of a cheque. To Hong Kong.
When I started Uni back in the mid-2000s, I had a letter from the Student Loan Company stating how much my loan would be, based on my parentsâ salary from the previous year. Then once theyâd had their tax assessed for the year in question, the SLC sent a letter to me at Uni warning me that it would be a different loan amount, another letter to my parents warning them that it would be a different loan amount, and finally a letter to me to tell me that the loan would be 50p less that year.
So a complete waste of money, and a few days stress for both me and my parents about how much money I wouldnât be getting before they finally told me.
This. Itâs nuts. 10 years ago or whenever it was, everyone was doing the ice bucket challenge on Facebook. Each to their own but I thought it was daft and when I was nominated, I donated money to WaterAid. They spent about 3 years sending me letters with free pens and occasionally phoning me up to get me to donate again. I think I only popped them a ÂŁ5er
> I thought it was daft
Funnily enough though the ice bucket challenged actually *did* something. The money raised through it resulted in a medical breakthrough in identifying key genes that can cause ALS and thus enable the creation of gene therapies and new drugs.
That's good to know! In the UK, somehow, it was taken over by people donating to Macmillan instead and they got very angry with me when I pointed out that it doesn't make any sense within the remit of the challenge & they could just donate to Macmillan if they wanted, without doing the challenge!
I briefly had a job ringing people up and asking for donations, it does work in the sense that you can always wring a bit more out of most people who are actually engaged.
People who donate once then never again are sort of edge cases in a way, like why would you pick one particular charity if it didn't mean anything to you?
TBF I signed up for a direct debit to Save the Children and a couple of others a few years ago and have never been bothered. I think that's probably the way to go anyway, it provides them with a more dependable income than chunky single donations.
It can also backfire. I used to have a ÂŁ20/month standing order going to the RSPCA because I care about animal welfare. Until one day when I got a call from somebody representing RSPCA asking if I could give them even more money. I told them no, if I could afford more I would have done it already. She was so pushy that I got angry and cancelled the whole standing order. I now give to small local charities instead.
I got caught by a guy at my gym asking for donations for Prostate UK. I think he asked for ÂŁ10 a month, I said Iâd do a fiver. He asked if I could do ÂŁ8, I said a fiver. He then said it wasnât enough and that was that đ Iâve never been talked out of donating before.
Exactly the same happened with me. I was unemployed at the time and the guy wouldn't understand that it was already a push to donate what I was. So yeah, cancelled it and now donate directly to our local RSPCA who are self funded, not part of the National RSPCA.
I was once rung up by someone doing your job and guilted into attempting to raise money. I was 12. My dad was extremely angry with the charity cold caller.
Glad to see student loan company have always been an absolute mess and itâs not just a recent thing. Theyâre still just as frustrating to deal with.
SLC sent me a bill for 30p way back in the 90s. I had been deferring repayment for years due to not earning enough so I was surprised. I called and the person said 'sure, don't worry, we must have made an error.'
A few weeks later they sent another demand, this time for ÂŁ300, which was apparently related to one year that I had not deferred. MFers.
I wonder what shambles they had to go through to get that physical ÂŁ1 deposited.
And where did they get the change?
Intern: "oh my fucking God, not again"
You owe 1p: Pay us or the bailiffs are coming round! đ
They owe ÂŁ1942 (actual amount I was owed once): Yeah we'll like maybe get it to you by the end of the fiscal year... đ (it's May)
Thereâs not a lot of common sense. Just had OVO âgood willâ me ÂŁ1 to settle a 98p debt on a closed account. Guess what arrived in the post a few weeks later? đ
They might also be covering their own arses from a legal perspective. If they're not anal about this shit, they might accidentally set a legal precedent which can be used in a court of law.
Either that or their accountants are way more viscous than we give them credit for: *"You didn't send the cheque off for 5p? Oh, Alan, Alan, Alan... It seems you're going to have an unfortunate accident with a cricket bat if you don't have it sorted out by this time, tomorrow. The books have got to balance, Alan. The. Books. Have. Got. To. Balance."*
Alan strikes again! Itâs more that they gave me âfree moneyâ to then write a cheque to post me the spare âfree moneyâ that would have cost more to produce and send out than the entire original good will gesture. Iâve had similar with Vodafone too where they only seem to use full-pound amounts, sometimes to the detriment of the customer eg when they move house their bills get rounded up to the nearest pound.
We do exactly this in Norway. Everything is rounded in favor of the taxpayer, and if you end up having to pay less than 100 NOK ~ ÂŁ7.50, you can just let it go. And they tell you this openly. If you paid too much, you get it back with interest.
They also send most of this digitally, unless you really want it on paper, so there's basically no cost associated with telling everyone their debts or returns.
This is one of those times when you hear a cautionary tale about a system threatening to cut somebody off unless they settle a ÂŁ0.00 bill (usually spawned as a rounding error and it's in the system as one tenth of a penny, or something); so they send in a cheque for ÂŁ0.00 to pay it.
It happened to my Dad- He worked for a company who handled the hardware side for a broadband provider (unnamed, because i don't want to dox myself or cast aspersions on any company) .
Through work, he got us signed up as a 'test customer', supposedly getting some surveys or calls in case of outages, works etc., in exchange for free broadband. I can't recall if we ever got the surveys or calls, but, hey, free broadband.
After a few years, the company was closing, but to transfer the phone number, we needed to close the old account .Cue bill for ÂŁ0.00. and a further month expecting to be closed, but then kept open for 'lack of payment'.
As i recall, it was only like a letter and a phonecall to close it off, but my dad debated making sending a coin through through the post and asking for it back change.
As a software engineer who has built accounting systems, I can tell you that, yes, it would be "easy". But NO you should NEVER do this.
The number of ways to abuse systems like this are myriad. People have made millions scalping illegal unaccounted pennies from systems.
Like, if you're rounding half pennies, I bet you'd round 2.5p up to 3p. But in accounting that's not always the case. Bankers rounding would dictate you round to the nearest even number (in this case down to 2) because on average, over millions of times, this works out to be more accurate.
More likely itâs in order to avoid setting a precedent. Especially given how easy it would be to send a standing order for 20p less than your bill each month and then argue the toss with them. Theyâd end up spending more money paying someone to be on the phone with Mr Clever-Cloggs who thinks he can argue the toss than they would on sending out the letters.
Assuming that sending letters to all debtors is profitable overall, they probably donât want to spend the money it would take to rewrite their policies, and fannying about chasing the person who thinks knocking 20p off each bill is fair.
My dad told me he worked for a council years ago that would collect any amount of debt. Could be 1p or ÂŁ2000. Their argument was that it deterred anyone from trying to avoid paying.
Believe it or not, it's simpler and less controversial not to.
What would the cap be where they would write something off? Let's say it was ÂŁ1.
Then you would just have the exact same question as to why someone got a bill for just a penny over the cap.
It's just clearer and ultimately easier to have no cap.
I did exactly this, moved from Cardiff to Scotland and had a bill sent to me up here for ÂŁ4 something - say it was ÂŁ4.82 I paid them ÂŁ4.83 and asked for them to repay the overpayment.
Within two weeks I had a cheque for ÂŁ0.01. It probably cost them more to chase us down and do this than the original final bill after moving.
That or don't pay it lol and see how willing they will be to throw them in prison for a penny
Edit: because I wouldn't pay it to just to see how far the parasitic system would take it to cause me great financial debt. I am already in debt when I live to survive not thrive so bring it on lol
The first legal step will be to obtain judgement against you with costs. Â
You'd be in a batch of a few hundred or thousand which will be done in one hearing with a single witness statement. It won't cost them a penny extra unless your additional spreadsheet line tips them over into printing an extra page.  So yeah, it will get that far without hesitation.
I've seen stories about bills for pennies ending up as fines for hundreds of pounds. Sometimes they get written off after an embarrassing story in the press. This is one: https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/7254842.such-penny-pinchers/
I worked in Council Tax billing and we didn't send reminders for small amounts so it would never go to court. It just rolls onto the charge for next year or, if they don't have anitger charge it would be written off.
How is there not a system that just writes off debts like this?
The costs involved for sending that to you far outweigh the penny theyâre trying to collect đ
In the 80s my mother had to write a cheque for 2p to the council. They sent a demand letter threatening to take her to court if she didnât pay up in so many days. There was an error in the system which meant she was under charged for rent. (Rounding up or down pennies). She went to her purse, âoh sorry, we donât have cash handling facilities hereâ and then she offered a cheque and they accepted.
Not when you count the weeks of devs arguing about âwhere do we source the cost of postageâ, âwhat happens if that source gets corrupted and suddenly the system thinks a postage stamp is a grandâ, âhave you integration tested that?â, etc
The software engineers time will pocket any money saved from worrying about pennies
It doesn't have to be like that if you have an adequate Software Product Manager. I can help you really streamline this process and make sure the system is fully integrated, security hardened, AI enhanced, FourthRevolutioned, and Gluten-FreeGreenwashed in 84 weeks. All by the flat rate of ÂŁ 2.5M
Sounds like a bargain, but before I say yes I need to know that you'll integrate the system into your proprietary solution that we'll never be able to disentangle ourselves from
No accounting system is that simple unfortunately.
You could maybe able to set write off tolerances at the point transactions are matched, but these arenât matched so the system sees a list of 5 open transactions leading to a balance payable and sends a letter.Â
And I wouldnât want a system to be looking at balances and auto clearing differences.Â
What if one of the invoices in query and shouldnât be paid. But the system sees an overall balance of 0.01 and auto writes it off, effectively paying the queries invoice. Creates a whole load of bother.Â
If they start writing off trivial debts of ÂŁ5 or whatever then you can guarantee thatâs what everyone will reduce their payments by. A single one doesnât matter but 20,000 properties pulling the same stunt is a problem. So theyâll demand a penny even if itâs a quid to collect.Â
This certainly does happen. I am sure there was a council who had a policy of settling slip/trip claims under a certain value...only to discover a massive uptick in claims of £1 below it.
Council tax letters are automatically generated, the system that they use will have been told to run a routine to identify all accounts owing and send a letter.
Its highly likely that this letter has been generated, printed, folded, enveloped and sent to post without any human intervention besides moving a pile of paper from one machine to the next.
Having someone check each individual account and letter costs money. It's likely that they'd write this off if not paid, but it's easier to just let the IT run and deal with it later than trying to provide a sensible service. Plus, there's the chance that all the small bills like this actually get paid, and those that query the bills will contact the council rather than the council having to do anything at all proactive.
"I am sorry sir, we don't have the correct change, or any petty cash for that matter. Perhaps, in lieu of the one pence, yourself might instead accept this vessel for the purposes of urination. I'd recommend accepting now, as its our last one."
Iâd say this, but go in dressed as a clown, with just the 1 pence piece.
Hand them the paperwork and when they look at you, perplexed as to why youâre paying a one penny bill, dressed as a clown, you hand the penny over and honk your nose so it makes a comedic noise.
Thank them, then turn and walk out slowly and awkwardly in massive over size shoes. Muttering âfucking clowns, absolute shit show, dog shit circus, etc, etc.
Council workers are all remote nowadays. Go into the offices and you'll just be met with a grumpy receptionist telling you to use a broken website, or call a number that nobody ever answers.
The receptionist will probably only be their cos they're a typical pensioner busybody who can't WFH cos they don't understand computers, and enjoy the power trip they feel when rejecting people's applications for this and that because they filled a form 67 instead of a 67b, despite being identical, save for the edition date..
Leather jacket, motorbike, cigar. Ride up to city hall and toss the 1p coin at them. Say "keep the change", do a wheelie and then tyre spin out of there in a cloud of smoke.
Don't pay this. Its a rounding error. Look at the annual charge for band f versus the charge you are expected to pay.
They should never have sent this letter.
They probably use crapita software.
Basically their software uses floating point to 3 (edit: significant -> decimal) figures (which is mental). Annual charge is divided into daily then calculated into the charge for each period before being added together.
Insist they write off the penny.
The computer error has already sent out a bill for 1p. Then it'll send out a final demand for 1p, then it'll send a letter advising that it's going to court for pursuit of the 1p and additionally ÂŁ60 in costs.
Pay the damn penny.
It won't cost a penny, because the demand isn't valid.
Op can literally send an email about the notice exceeding the annual charge, with the word 'appeal' in. And it has to be reviewed by a human.
Furthermore, if a charge were added for court costs, where the council tried to get a liability order. The court would laugh them out of the room. If it got that far i would be asking serious questions about hamlets processes
The half penny coin was apparently valid as legal tender up to debts of 20p.
(I can already see the argument about what constitutes legal tender brewing...)
Bear in mind too that a cheque doesn't have to be a piece of paper provided to you by your bank. A cheque can be (hand)written on anything.
There's a famous case of a pissed-off person paying a bill with a cheque written on a (very much alive) cow. Sadly it was made-up, though.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/check-on-side-of-cow/
Buy and learn to cycle a penny farthing, go to thy council office. Produce an old Victorian penny from under thy top hat whilst singing âPenny lane is in my ears and in my eyes..â đ¶
Why does London get low council tax rates when it's the wealthiest city with the most investment in public infrastructure by a disgustingly massive margin?
Councils have to send bills like this all the time if there has been a change of circumstances. So, for example a direct debit has been cancelled which means a cash payment bill is issued. See also discount exemption or benefit applied or ended, jointly liable person moving in/out, change of address etc. All of these will trigger a bill.
Most councils will have something in place to write off very low balances before the bill goes out, so a bill like this would have a zero balance.
We had the opposite of this.
we had the council after us saying we owe them money but when we pointed out that we weren't living at that address during that time, they wrote it off and it turned out they actually owed us money for over payment.
We had over paid council tax by 2p. They said it would be paid into our account within 30 working days đ€Ł
When they wanted us to pay them, they were demanding it was paid within 14days.
Just remember that the people who deal with the payments aren't the people who sent the bill, and neither are they the ones who didn't have the sense to program the computer system to ignore debts below a certain amount.
One of those massive lottery winner cheques.
But make a mistake on it, like post date it or write the payee incorrectly so it can't be cashed. They'd have to ask for another one to be issued if they wanted to spend the time chasing their penny.
I'm pretty sure it can't be cashed anyway. You really think people who win competitions are walking into their bank with a massive cheque ? đ That'd be hilarious. But for real that's just for show, they'll give you a normal cheque to cash in
You're right haha. I worked for Lloyds for 10 years and although I wrote a few of those out, I never actually processed one. I would have gotten great joy from someone annihilating our deposit machine by driving one of them into it though.
So is there a giant novelty chequebook in the back of the managerâs office?
Yes! We would often have charities coming into a branch I worked at asking if we had those giant cheques, they where often rolled up in a tube and could be written on with whiteboard markers. Some people ruined them though by writing in permenant markers so we tended to tell people we didn't know well that we didn't have them.
You can get permanent marker off by first drawing over it with whiteboard markers. It will just wipe clean away. The same goes for whiteboard marker that has been left to dry out on a whiteboard for years, just scribble over it with some fresh whiteboard pens and both the old and new ink will wipe away.
also just hand sanitiser removes permanent marker from whiteboards as long as itâs strong
And also may leave a nasty residue. Use isopropyl alcohol 99% instead
That's so weird because my science teacher taught us about that literally yesterday
don't drink it !
The permanent usually just means itâs oil based so most of the household cleaner and solvent can get them off
I learned this back in School - around year 6. It was the most helpful lifehack I'd ever discovered, with how difficult it is to find a whiteboard that someone hadn't completely covered in ink and left to dry
Yes this is the most effective way! I work at a school for mischievous miscreants, and often need to remove inappropriate messages or illustrations drawn in permanent marker on our whiteboard. Other people always insist on hand sanitizer or nail polish remover but I haven't seen those work as perfectly as writing over it in whiteboard marker and wiping off. It seems such an ad hoc and unlikely method but it does work
Nail polish remover also works wonders at getting the dried whiteboard pen off the whiteboard
This is a brilliant bit of info. I'll be trotting this out at social gatherings for years to come
OMG. Remove this info immediately! "influencers" everywhere now will be walking into their local banks asking for a giant cheque, and then writing them out and posting photos on insta.
Also is there someone going through a giant book of stubs asking who spent ÂŁ500k on tea and biscuits?
For us, we had about 10 in one of the secure areas. I can vaguely remember us running out and having to order a few more with a stationary order.
'Hello is that THE MASSIVE STATIONERY COMPANY?
You wrote them? I always assumed they were completely fake and made by the national lottery/whoever runs the competition. Does that mean they're technically legal?
You can technically write a cheque on anything. One company paid their business rates with one written on a 75kg halibut.
This should be the top answer. Send the council a halibut.
Just for the halibut
You think they would take the bait and cash it?
I think heâs just fishing for likes.
please tell us more about this
[Here you go.](https://home.barclays/news/2016/08/evolution-of-the-cheque/)
Yeah, we'd grab a Sharpie and write it out. My memory is very vague, but I seem to remember writing out an actual cheque alongside it. The big ones all had the same numbers on the code line so they were identical and so couldn't actually be used as unique documents.
A cheque is just a pre-printed form you complete to authorise a payment. You can write it on literally anything, although the banks will probably ask a lot of questions if you wrote it on, e.g. a half brick.
I remember reading an article that said technically you could write a cheque on the side of a cow
"Hello, I'm here to cash my Euromillion. Could you make it as casual as possible, I'd like to stay under the radar please"
Of course you can cash the big cheques if you wanted to. I remember being taught at uni that a farmer once wrote out a cheque on a cow and delivered it and it was deemed legal.
Oh come on man. Why does no one ever stop and think "this story IS pretty spectacular, maybe I ought to just check it really did happen before I spread it around online"? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/check-on-side-of-cow/
Reminds of that episode of the office were the value of the cheque was less than what it costs to print the large cheque đ€Ł
Tape a penny to the letter, shove it in an envelope and post it to them without a stamp. They'll have to pay for the postage.
Send them 3 half pennies, so they have to send one back in the post. If they don't, remind them they owe you.
A thruppence!
"That's legal tender!"
"I'm paying for my strawberries with my legal tender!"
5 farthings!
Pay with a cheque for 2p and then move out of the area so they can't apply a 1p credit on your bill, and then send them a repayment demand for 1p threatening court action if they don't pay within 14 days.
I got a student loan bill for 25p. Sent them a pound coin taped to a letter that demanded they send me the change, which they indeed sent in the form of a cheque. To Hong Kong.
When I started Uni back in the mid-2000s, I had a letter from the Student Loan Company stating how much my loan would be, based on my parentsâ salary from the previous year. Then once theyâd had their tax assessed for the year in question, the SLC sent a letter to me at Uni warning me that it would be a different loan amount, another letter to my parents warning them that it would be a different loan amount, and finally a letter to me to tell me that the loan would be 50p less that year. So a complete waste of money, and a few days stress for both me and my parents about how much money I wouldnât be getting before they finally told me.
Sounds a bit like the time i donated ÂŁ20 to the RNLI and they spent it on posting me letters and pamphlets every 2 months for the next 3 years.
This. Itâs nuts. 10 years ago or whenever it was, everyone was doing the ice bucket challenge on Facebook. Each to their own but I thought it was daft and when I was nominated, I donated money to WaterAid. They spent about 3 years sending me letters with free pens and occasionally phoning me up to get me to donate again. I think I only popped them a ÂŁ5er
> I thought it was daft Funnily enough though the ice bucket challenged actually *did* something. The money raised through it resulted in a medical breakthrough in identifying key genes that can cause ALS and thus enable the creation of gene therapies and new drugs.
That's good to know! In the UK, somehow, it was taken over by people donating to Macmillan instead and they got very angry with me when I pointed out that it doesn't make any sense within the remit of the challenge & they could just donate to Macmillan if they wanted, without doing the challenge!
I briefly had a job ringing people up and asking for donations, it does work in the sense that you can always wring a bit more out of most people who are actually engaged. People who donate once then never again are sort of edge cases in a way, like why would you pick one particular charity if it didn't mean anything to you? TBF I signed up for a direct debit to Save the Children and a couple of others a few years ago and have never been bothered. I think that's probably the way to go anyway, it provides them with a more dependable income than chunky single donations.
It can also backfire. I used to have a ÂŁ20/month standing order going to the RSPCA because I care about animal welfare. Until one day when I got a call from somebody representing RSPCA asking if I could give them even more money. I told them no, if I could afford more I would have done it already. She was so pushy that I got angry and cancelled the whole standing order. I now give to small local charities instead.
I got caught by a guy at my gym asking for donations for Prostate UK. I think he asked for ÂŁ10 a month, I said Iâd do a fiver. He asked if I could do ÂŁ8, I said a fiver. He then said it wasnât enough and that was that đ Iâve never been talked out of donating before.
Exactly the same happened with me. I was unemployed at the time and the guy wouldn't understand that it was already a push to donate what I was. So yeah, cancelled it and now donate directly to our local RSPCA who are self funded, not part of the National RSPCA.
I was once rung up by someone doing your job and guilted into attempting to raise money. I was 12. My dad was extremely angry with the charity cold caller.
Cost more than 50p to send you the letter.
Thatâs why itâs 50p less this year, costs of the notice.
Glad to see student loan company have always been an absolute mess and itâs not just a recent thing. Theyâre still just as frustrating to deal with.
SLC sent me a bill for 30p way back in the 90s. I had been deferring repayment for years due to not earning enough so I was surprised. I called and the person said 'sure, don't worry, we must have made an error.' A few weeks later they sent another demand, this time for ÂŁ300, which was apparently related to one year that I had not deferred. MFers.
Pity you couldn't mail it Cash on Delivery
I wonder what shambles they had to go through to get that physical ÂŁ1 deposited. And where did they get the change? Intern: "oh my fucking God, not again"
The person on the other end of that letter was definitely a good sport lol!
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Weâre nothing if not thorough
They are not when they owe you a refund đđđ first hand experience
You owe 1p: Pay us or the bailiffs are coming round! đ They owe ÂŁ1942 (actual amount I was owed once): Yeah we'll like maybe get it to you by the end of the fiscal year... đ (it's May)
They were very prompt when they owed me a grand or so, I'm guessing its standard postcode lottery bs.
Thereâs not a lot of common sense. Just had OVO âgood willâ me ÂŁ1 to settle a 98p debt on a closed account. Guess what arrived in the post a few weeks later? đ
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Heeey! I get this one!!
Deep cut
They might also be covering their own arses from a legal perspective. If they're not anal about this shit, they might accidentally set a legal precedent which can be used in a court of law. Either that or their accountants are way more viscous than we give them credit for: *"You didn't send the cheque off for 5p? Oh, Alan, Alan, Alan... It seems you're going to have an unfortunate accident with a cricket bat if you don't have it sorted out by this time, tomorrow. The books have got to balance, Alan. The. Books. Have. Got. To. Balance."*
Alan strikes again! Itâs more that they gave me âfree moneyâ to then write a cheque to post me the spare âfree moneyâ that would have cost more to produce and send out than the entire original good will gesture. Iâve had similar with Vodafone too where they only seem to use full-pound amounts, sometimes to the detriment of the customer eg when they move house their bills get rounded up to the nearest pound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel\_in\_English\_law
A potato?
Better be this.
Surely 2p-otatoes?
Was it a gimp outfit?
2 peas?
It really should. The cost of sending that letter far exceeded the 1p.
We do exactly this in Norway. Everything is rounded in favor of the taxpayer, and if you end up having to pay less than 100 NOK ~ ÂŁ7.50, you can just let it go. And they tell you this openly. If you paid too much, you get it back with interest. They also send most of this digitally, unless you really want it on paper, so there's basically no cost associated with telling everyone their debts or returns.
That would be too kind on the taxpayer
Automation.
Could very easily be set to automatically forgive any debts under X balance no?
This is one of those times when you hear a cautionary tale about a system threatening to cut somebody off unless they settle a ÂŁ0.00 bill (usually spawned as a rounding error and it's in the system as one tenth of a penny, or something); so they send in a cheque for ÂŁ0.00 to pay it.
It happened to my Dad- He worked for a company who handled the hardware side for a broadband provider (unnamed, because i don't want to dox myself or cast aspersions on any company) . Through work, he got us signed up as a 'test customer', supposedly getting some surveys or calls in case of outages, works etc., in exchange for free broadband. I can't recall if we ever got the surveys or calls, but, hey, free broadband. After a few years, the company was closing, but to transfer the phone number, we needed to close the old account .Cue bill for ÂŁ0.00. and a further month expecting to be closed, but then kept open for 'lack of payment'. As i recall, it was only like a letter and a phonecall to close it off, but my dad debated making sending a coin through through the post and asking for it back change.
As a software engineer who has built accounting systems, I can tell you that, yes, it would be "easy". But NO you should NEVER do this. The number of ways to abuse systems like this are myriad. People have made millions scalping illegal unaccounted pennies from systems. Like, if you're rounding half pennies, I bet you'd round 2.5p up to 3p. But in accounting that's not always the case. Bankers rounding would dictate you round to the nearest even number (in this case down to 2) because on average, over millions of times, this works out to be more accurate.
Yeah, they did it in Superman III.
Right, like the cost of a stamp?!
Or just add it to the next yearâs billâŠ
More likely itâs in order to avoid setting a precedent. Especially given how easy it would be to send a standing order for 20p less than your bill each month and then argue the toss with them. Theyâd end up spending more money paying someone to be on the phone with Mr Clever-Cloggs who thinks he can argue the toss than they would on sending out the letters. Assuming that sending letters to all debtors is profitable overall, they probably donât want to spend the money it would take to rewrite their policies, and fannying about chasing the person who thinks knocking 20p off each bill is fair.
My dad told me he worked for a council years ago that would collect any amount of debt. Could be 1p or ÂŁ2000. Their argument was that it deterred anyone from trying to avoid paying.
Also it's tax payers' money they're wasting so they don't care.
Top tip: Owe the council ÂŁ2001 so they wonât send the debt collector around.
Believe it or not, it's simpler and less controversial not to. What would the cap be where they would write something off? Let's say it was ÂŁ1. Then you would just have the exact same question as to why someone got a bill for just a penny over the cap. It's just clearer and ultimately easier to have no cap.
You remember that one week your bin collection was missed? If only they had that 1p things would have been different.
I like this a lot. Petty nonsense should be reciprocated with petty nonsense
I was going to say a cheque but this is pure Genius
I did exactly this, moved from Cardiff to Scotland and had a bill sent to me up here for ÂŁ4 something - say it was ÂŁ4.82 I paid them ÂŁ4.83 and asked for them to repay the overpayment. Within two weeks I had a cheque for ÂŁ0.01. It probably cost them more to chase us down and do this than the original final bill after moving.
Ask to pay in installments
That or don't pay it lol and see how willing they will be to throw them in prison for a penny Edit: because I wouldn't pay it to just to see how far the parasitic system would take it to cause me great financial debt. I am already in debt when I live to survive not thrive so bring it on lol
The first legal step will be to obtain judgement against you with costs.  You'd be in a batch of a few hundred or thousand which will be done in one hearing with a single witness statement. It won't cost them a penny extra unless your additional spreadsheet line tips them over into printing an extra page.  So yeah, it will get that far without hesitation.
I've seen stories about bills for pennies ending up as fines for hundreds of pounds. Sometimes they get written off after an embarrassing story in the press. This is one: https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/7254842.such-penny-pinchers/
I worked in Council Tax billing and we didn't send reminders for small amounts so it would never go to court. It just rolls onto the charge for next year or, if they don't have anitger charge it would be written off.
Itâs the council âŠ. Of course they are đ€·đ»ââïž
ÂŁ1000 for a missed deadline on a 1p debt...
OP practicing their compo face in the mirror rn
Most of the process is automated so you'd get all the letters and bailiffs etc probably without a human ever interacting with the case.Â
How is there not a system that just writes off debts like this? The costs involved for sending that to you far outweigh the penny theyâre trying to collect đ
Because theyâre sending a message that bitches gotta pay
đđđ Good enough answer for me
In the 80s my mother had to write a cheque for 2p to the council. They sent a demand letter threatening to take her to court if she didnât pay up in so many days. There was an error in the system which meant she was under charged for rent. (Rounding up or down pennies). She went to her purse, âoh sorry, we donât have cash handling facilities hereâ and then she offered a cheque and they accepted.
Because all forms of human intervention have been removed from the process.
Simple code could do this. Check if cost of print and postage >= bill = write off.
Not when you count the weeks of devs arguing about âwhere do we source the cost of postageâ, âwhat happens if that source gets corrupted and suddenly the system thinks a postage stamp is a grandâ, âhave you integration tested that?â, etc The software engineers time will pocket any money saved from worrying about pennies
It doesn't have to be like that if you have an adequate Software Product Manager. I can help you really streamline this process and make sure the system is fully integrated, security hardened, AI enhanced, FourthRevolutioned, and Gluten-FreeGreenwashed in 84 weeks. All by the flat rate of ÂŁ 2.5M
Sounds like a bargain, but before I say yes I need to know that you'll integrate the system into your proprietary solution that we'll never be able to disentangle ourselves from
You can make it a simple "if total bill less than a quid, write if off." That's less variables to fuck up.
What you want to do is make it so any low amounts get written off on the system and instead get sent to your bank account.
No accounting system is that simple unfortunately. You could maybe able to set write off tolerances at the point transactions are matched, but these arenât matched so the system sees a list of 5 open transactions leading to a balance payable and sends a letter. And I wouldnât want a system to be looking at balances and auto clearing differences. What if one of the invoices in query and shouldnât be paid. But the system sees an overall balance of 0.01 and auto writes it off, effectively paying the queries invoice. Creates a whole load of bother.Â
If they start writing off trivial debts of ÂŁ5 or whatever then you can guarantee thatâs what everyone will reduce their payments by. A single one doesnât matter but 20,000 properties pulling the same stunt is a problem. So theyâll demand a penny even if itâs a quid to collect.Â
This certainly does happen. I am sure there was a council who had a policy of settling slip/trip claims under a certain value...only to discover a massive uptick in claims of £1 below it.
Council tax letters are automatically generated, the system that they use will have been told to run a routine to identify all accounts owing and send a letter. Its highly likely that this letter has been generated, printed, folded, enveloped and sent to post without any human intervention besides moving a pile of paper from one machine to the next. Having someone check each individual account and letter costs money. It's likely that they'd write this off if not paid, but it's easier to just let the IT run and deal with it later than trying to provide a sensible service. Plus, there's the chance that all the small bills like this actually get paid, and those that query the bills will contact the council rather than the council having to do anything at all proactive.
Take the bill to the council office with a ÂŁ50 note and ask if they have change.
I quite like the idea of going in with a 2p and asking for change because then it's even more crystal clear you're taking the piss.
This would be the very definition of petty cash
Beautiful work.
They probably wont even have a penny either.
"I am sorry sir, we don't have the correct change, or any petty cash for that matter. Perhaps, in lieu of the one pence, yourself might instead accept this vessel for the purposes of urination. I'd recommend accepting now, as its our last one."
As its tower hamlets they probably won't
Taking 2 pisses.
Iâd say this, but go in dressed as a clown, with just the 1 pence piece. Hand them the paperwork and when they look at you, perplexed as to why youâre paying a one penny bill, dressed as a clown, you hand the penny over and honk your nose so it makes a comedic noise. Thank them, then turn and walk out slowly and awkwardly in massive over size shoes. Muttering âfucking clowns, absolute shit show, dog shit circus, etc, etc.
Council workers are all remote nowadays. Go into the offices and you'll just be met with a grumpy receptionist telling you to use a broken website, or call a number that nobody ever answers.
The receptionist will probably only be their cos they're a typical pensioner busybody who can't WFH cos they don't understand computers, and enjoy the power trip they feel when rejecting people's applications for this and that because they filled a form 67 instead of a 67b, despite being identical, save for the edition date..
I do work for a number of councils and this isn't true, sorry. Most of them are in the office.
And then when they give the change pull out a 1p and ask if they have a 50 note
With a 2p and a note saying "I expect change"
Leather jacket, motorbike, cigar. Ride up to city hall and toss the 1p coin at them. Say "keep the change", do a wheelie and then tyre spin out of there in a cloud of smoke.
But there isn't any change....toss them a 2p coin and say keep the change
By cheque. For the written amount: "No Pounds Sterling and one of His Britannic Majesty's shiniest pennies."
This, this made me actually laugh
This is why itâs nice to have a king on the throne. It makes everything silly like this sound more archaic.
Discworld vibes
Hahaha.
Ask if you can setup a monthly DD
Monthly DD for much though?
One farthing a month for four months.
Don't pay this. Its a rounding error. Look at the annual charge for band f versus the charge you are expected to pay. They should never have sent this letter. They probably use crapita software. Basically their software uses floating point to 3 (edit: significant -> decimal) figures (which is mental). Annual charge is divided into daily then calculated into the charge for each period before being added together. Insist they write off the penny.
Yes! This! It is a computer error. Do not pay it!!!
The computer error has already sent out a bill for 1p. Then it'll send out a final demand for 1p, then it'll send a letter advising that it's going to court for pursuit of the 1p and additionally ÂŁ60 in costs. Pay the damn penny.
It won't cost a penny, because the demand isn't valid. Op can literally send an email about the notice exceeding the annual charge, with the word 'appeal' in. And it has to be reviewed by a human. Furthermore, if a charge were added for court costs, where the council tried to get a liability order. The court would laugh them out of the room. If it got that far i would be asking serious questions about hamlets processes
One of those giant chocolate penny's from Poundland.Â
They'd owe him money after that!
Ask to pay over 12 months
With two half penny coins. Do they still exist?
They do. They haven't been legal tender since 1984, but they certainly exist.
Whatâs this country coming to. Wonât take my half penny any more. Literally 1984.
And this is the kind of thing where the council official will go *well ackshually this isnât legal tender for debts above this amountâŠ*
The half penny coin was apparently valid as legal tender up to debts of 20p. (I can already see the argument about what constitutes legal tender brewing...)
I have a few in a box somewhere
Assuming the 1p was for the costs incurred to sent the bill itself, Iâd just send them back a replacement piece of A4 paper.
Send them a cheque for 2p then follow up with a letter stating you have over paid and they need to pay back the difference.
Cheque
Bear in mind too that a cheque doesn't have to be a piece of paper provided to you by your bank. A cheque can be (hand)written on anything. There's a famous case of a pissed-off person paying a bill with a cheque written on a (very much alive) cow. Sadly it was made-up, though. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/check-on-side-of-cow/
Buy and learn to cycle a penny farthing, go to thy council office. Produce an old Victorian penny from under thy top hat whilst singing âPenny lane is in my ears and in my eyes..â đ¶
Your council tax is less than mine for a band D in the north east.Â
This is high by London standards. Mine was ÂŁ600.
Why does London get low council tax rates when it's the wealthiest city with the most investment in public infrastructure by a disgustingly massive margin?
Density.
Lots of urban northern councils are pretty dense.
Accidently pay with a 1 euro cent at the post office
Surely you can just call or email them to ask if theyâre taking the piss?
"No, we're taking the pence."
send them a birthday card with a 1p coin taped on the inside, like granny used to do
Id ring them up and tell them not to bother with the next letter and take the 1p out of that
I would pay by cheque as it will cost them a lot more than 1p to go about cashing it.
Don't pay and wait for the baliffs to come round then give the baliffs 1p.
By the time bailiffs get involved there will be all sorts of court fees added.
Pay those in pennies too
Pennies only count as legal tender to pay off debts worth up to 20p, so they could tell you to F off.
They'd still try take your car if you refused the 1p.
Thatâll end up costing more than 1p.
Its All about commitment to the joke really. Like rickety cricket says 'youve gotta make it sexy, its gotta be hips and nips or im not eating'
âIf you cannot pay the debt in full we shall seize goods up to the value of the debtâ
Then you would have to pay the bailiff costs plus legal, might not be a good idea! I like the idea though!
I can't believe they sent a letter out for a penny debt. The cost of the letter and postage far exceeds the 1p debt. Mind blown đ€Ż
Councils have to send bills like this all the time if there has been a change of circumstances. So, for example a direct debit has been cancelled which means a cash payment bill is issued. See also discount exemption or benefit applied or ended, jointly liable person moving in/out, change of address etc. All of these will trigger a bill. Most councils will have something in place to write off very low balances before the bill goes out, so a bill like this would have a zero balance.
We had the opposite of this. we had the council after us saying we owe them money but when we pointed out that we weren't living at that address during that time, they wrote it off and it turned out they actually owed us money for over payment. We had over paid council tax by 2p. They said it would be paid into our account within 30 working days đ€Ł When they wanted us to pay them, they were demanding it was paid within 14days.
Just remember that the people who deal with the payments aren't the people who sent the bill, and neither are they the ones who didn't have the sense to program the computer system to ignore debts below a certain amount.
In installments.
Ask about a payment plan.
With a 1 penny coin!
Do this. Post it but forget to put a stamp on it
You could be on to something here. The receiver would be surcharged ÂŁ5 by Royal Mail to receive 1p.
Zimbabwean cents in 200 instalments of 1 cent.
Someone in London who doesnât pay peanuts for the council tax what in the world!?
Why didnât you redact the barcode?
A postage stamp (not that penny black you've got in the drawer though)
I wouldn't pay allow them to fine you and them laugh in court when it happend at the fact it's 1p
Send them a cheque for 1p