For truly epic incompetence you cannot beat the welfare system. They don't seem to understand they are dealing with people's lives - or that by definition they are the safety net for people who usually have no other resources to see them through whatever crisis (job loss, marital breakup, unexpected single parenthood, disability or illness) has led them to claim welfare in the first place. My last Disability Living Allowance claim, it took *nine months* from the date of my claim for them to turn me down and me to get an appeal set up - for the appeal panel to take one look at my evidence and actually ask the DWP representative, in front of me, why on earth such an obvious case had been rejected. I got the £2,000+ they should have been paying me over those nine months in a lump sum, which was lovely and all, but I didn't *need* a lump sum of cash - I'd *needed* a little bit of regular cash to, you know, live off for the previous nine months... Incapacity Benefit was no better. When I got my job, I phoned them to tell them to cease my claim and I also told them in writing. They continued paying money straight into my bank account for another month. I finally persuaded them to stop it but they wouldn't/couldn't tell me how to pay the extra money back. Then five months later, along came the nasty letter threatening me with legal action if I did not immediately repay the money that I had unlawfully "claimed" but to which I was not entitled... thankfully I'd kept it aside and could pay the whole lot back immediately and avoid additional aggro. Tax Credits have to be the winner though. They sent me nasty letters for three years, demanding immediate payment of several hundred pounds, threatening baliffs and legal action and so on, before finally agreeing that they'd made a cockup and I didn't owe them any money. That particular example of incompetence is the largest part of the reason why I don't now claim the Tax Credits our country says I am entitled to as a disabled worker. A troll on my blog spent a while taunting me that I seemed to think the DWP and Tax Credits were out to get me. The trouble is, they're not. My experiences with them are 100% normal, representative and par for the course.