Incorporated Companies Credits
Case reference FOI2019/00051
Published 25 July 2019
Request
We wish to obtain information, from the Council, relating to unclaimed credits for non-domestic ratepayers.
We request a list of both credit balances and credit balance write-ons accrued since your earliest records, for the amounts owing to all "incorporated" companies within the authorities billing area, including
•The name of each ratepayer for which the credit or credit write on relates to.
• The value of overpayment in each case.
• The year(s) in which overpayment was made.
• The hereditament address.
Response
Guildford Borough Council publishes information regarding credits on its website. You can find the files at:
https://www.guildford.gov.uk/article/8041/Overpaid-credit-accounts---Business-rates along with an explanation of the contents.
The following information that you requested is not available:
Property Address: Accounts can cover multiple properties, and credits are held at account level. This means that we cannot simply link a credit to a property. It is therefore not possible to provide the property address.
Written off credits: The Council does not hold a list of genuine credits that have been written off of accounts. Credits can occur for a variety of reasons and we make no distinction when writing them off the system (we have no need to do this for the purposes of Business Rates). However credits are not written off simply because a ratepayer has failed to claim them, as I hope the age of some of the credits on the published list will show.
As the information that is available is already in the public domain I consider this information to be exempt from disclosure on request under Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as it is already available elsewhere.
Documents
This is Guildford Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.