Centrelink FTB help

Hi there,

I would love it if anyone could help me out on any experiences.

I got very little FTB last year as I estimated that my partner earnt 80k in the whole year. Things went badly and DP's tax return just lodged shows our actual earnings at under 40k.

For two months of the financial year I didn't even get FTB at all as I was getting it withheld...so now it ends up that they owe me quite a lot of money, which we are really impatiently waiting for as we owe the tax department lots of tax and this money was going to go toward it. My estimations of this and the RA I never received, CL owes us over 10k. We really need to pay the tax department and numerous other bills before xmas.

Anyway...it shows up that DPs tax return has hit CL BUT instead of it being automatically processed, it's been 'flagged' for manual processing for a reason they can't tell me why and they can't/won't give me a reason or time frame of when the money I'm owed will be coming through. I really was thinking that it would be like last time, just automatically once our tax return was filed.

I am desperately hoping this money will come in before xmas, or we won't be having one.

Has anyone had this happen to them with their tax return going to centrelink? If so, how long did it take for them to manually process it. Does anyone know what this might mean?

Thanks in advance for any help :pray:

i had the same thing happen to me not long ago i got a big $1.00 thats right and when i moved to where i am now i went and told them and lets just say someone f^&ked up big time i was spos to be getting close to 600.00 p/f then i went in to see if i could get the 1000.00p/c as i didnt get any and she looked it up and she had to go and ask someone about and came back and said they OWED me over 8000.00 and it was put into the bank a few days latter...
i dont see why they cant tell you when they will be putting it in seems strange
good luck with it all
sarahxxxx

It sounds like it might be a little messy and therefore the manual intervention. It's big $$, so they don't want to make a mistake. There are entire teams dedicated to Manual Intervention and you have to have lots of FAO experience to be in one, so at least you know it will be done properly.

It might be worth ringing to ask how long it might take, I'm not sure if there is a 'time limit' on man interventions.

when a tax return comes through that doesn't gel with estimates, or when the top up is going to be huge (as lulu mentioned) it gets diverted to the manual intervention team who go through and check everything to make sure you're not overpaid. this team are specialists, and will get your record checked as soon as they can. there are only two small teams Australia wide. there is no processing timeframe for anything referred to Manual Intervention - they get to it in order of it arriving in the queue. there are no ways to get this pushed through any quicker than it is going to be done. i know only about 3 months ago, they processed 17000 activities in 17 days!

sorry to disappoint you, but all you can do is wait it out. i would suggest contacting ATO and making a payment arrangement for your partners tax (they let you pay it off) and then make the lump sum payment when it arrives

Ah, okay, this makes sense then, thankyou BG, Lulu and Mrs M. Yep, we earned nearly 3 times less than what I estimated.

I know you probably can't answer this, Would it be possibly reasonable to expect that it might be here before Christmas in your experience BG? Yep, I totally understand that there is nothing I can do to make it speed up or anything, I guess just ime before, they did it automatically so I assumed this time would be the same, but I understand.

We've already put the tax department off for going on three years now and we can't make the payment plan, which is why we were really hoping to get this asap as they are talking about us selling assets now. Things just went unexpectedly bad.

Thanks so much for all your help.

knowing the turnaround for MIV cases, i wouldn't bet on it.

It maaaaaay be worth a phone call to explain why you need it asap, let the know its holding up stuff for the tax etc, you miiiiiight get someone sympathetic that can help you :pray:

unfortunately, no matter how sympathetic the person you speak to, it will only be pushed through if there is another activity that is payment affecting that the MIV activity is stopping. sympathy means nothing as the consultants are not allowed to queue jump where it puts someone else further down the list without reason

I have a friend going through this same thing. Any big returns the tax dept investigates to make sure it is all in order and no mistakes have been made,

yup - if you estimate something like 80k but only earn 40k, they look into it to make sure it's all above board...