Ah now listen - its all mad Ted.
My 90 year old (challenged) Mum got the letter - its fairly unintelligible to me but if I am reading it right its saying that they have known all along about her private and her sw pensions but that the figure they were using for her sw pension was 1XX94 instead of 1XX98.......... Now if I was writing to a customer or client to say that I'd have said it simply. i.e. "Dear Mrs X.......oops we appear to have underestimated your sw pension by approx. €4 - this will mean a small adjustment to your tax credit which will be reflected in your net income in 2012".
I suspect she is one of many many thousands that the computer threw up as "non-compliant" and no one ran a de minimis analysis (or cost benefit analysis) or adjusted the letters to take account of the reality which in some cases was a few euros.
I don't think its an approach that will save much money for the state!
I think you're missing a key point in the letter (at least it was in the letter I saw), which says along the lines of "I
STRONGLY urge you to examine the information overleaf" and went on to say that if there was any doubt as to the accuracy / correctness of the Revenue figure (i.e. the one to be used going forward) to please make contact. Given that clearly the records received by Revenue aren't 100% accurate, a
de minimis analysis which would take those people out of the loop, would possibly result in a greater number of cases with unclarified discrepancies going forward.
In fact I'm watching Josephine Feehily on Oirechtais Report as I type here, and she just said exactly the point I'm making above - she urged everyone who got the letters to check that the new pension figures are correct. She also pointed out that most people have entitlements they haven't claimed, like health expenses, service charges etc...
The only case I've looked at, will result in a repayment of €1,900 to a pensioner who received on of these letters. When the dust has settled on this, the thousands of people who actually get refunds won't be long about forgetting the fright they got (from the sensationalist coverage in the media), when they're off on an unexpected holiday, or trading up the car...
But of course those refunds will be paid for out of the money collected from the people who deliberately or otherwise underpaid their share. And while it may cause some distress for those individuals, it's an unfortunate necessity, and no matter how delicately Revenue approached them a certain amount of distress would still occur.