Got a letter from the DVLA about a tax disc refund which says "We cannot process your refund for one of three reasons. Read the reasons below and decide which one it might be and then follow the instructions overleaf for sorting out that reason."
It just sounds really silly for them to say "We can't process your refund but we don't know why - please tell us!"
Spoke to someone there on the phone and they don't know what the problem is either so they are having another go.
DVLA computer systems have been up the Swannee for several weeks now. My new tax disc took nearly 4 weeks to arrive, instead of the usual few days. Could be the answer.
What were the reasons?
Weeks? I thought they'd been in Swansea for decades.
I can't remember a time when they were never in Swansea. Wasn't it one of the first (central) government functions to be sent to the regions
tim
You don't/didn't own the vehicle. Your details in the application are different from those on the logbook. You didn't say why you wanted a refund.
Got the "You are no longer the registered keeper" letter several weeks ago.
OK, so presumably you either scrapped the car or traded it in, since if you had sold it you would have sold the tax disc with it. So reasons 1 and 2 don't apply, unless you mis-spelled or they mis-read some of the key details like the registration number or your name or address. Did you change address and forget to tell them? As for reason 3, did you forget to give a reason?
Didn't you apply for the tax refund at the same time as you got rid of the car? It seems odd that you'd wait for weeks. Of course maybe you didn't and your application just sat in their queue for weeks.
But you're right, it *is* really silly for them not to state the reason(s) which caused them to reject your application. Normally when large organisations send out a boilerplate letter which gives several possible reasons for something, or has one or more of several things it wants to say to you, they have tick boxes next to them all, and they mark the one(s) which are relevant to your case.
I applied for mine online on December 22nd and it arrived yesterday. That's not bad, in view of the fact that much of the intervening time was public holidays.
Chris
Why are you no longer the registered keeper? Did you sell the vehicle? If so, doesn't any balance of the tax disc get sold to the new owner along with the vehicle itself?
Chris
If he wanted a tax refund, he *must* have ceased being the RK, unless he chose to take it off-road and made a SORN declaration.
If you sell privately to another driver, that's usually the case. But if you trade it in at a dealer's, the car is going to be sitting around for ages before it's re-sold, so there's little point in having it taxed for all that time (and any test driving would be done using trade plates), so one would normally retain the disc for a refund.
All sent at the same time, right after trading the car in. One letter came back in a week or two - the other took a while longer.
DVLA confirmed on the phone that reasons 1,2 & 3 do not apply. I can only assume that the system (human or otherwise) tried to process the refund before processing the change of ownership.
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