An unemployed man became so frustrated at the delay in obtaining tax credits in the UK that he stuck his hand to the desk in the tax office in protest. It worked, he walked out with a cheque for 6 weeks worth of tax credits (whatever they are).

Read his story here

It could have been worse. He could have nailed his hand to the desk since it was the tacks office.

Very clever, TW, very clever.

It was certainly an original solution to the problem!

Sue, I know the type of work that you do and I'm surprised you haven't had clients try something similar - I recently attended our local benefits agency to lodge a claim for my son(Broken leg!) I was told that the queue for the Reception was about a four hour wait (All I wanted to do was hand in the completed form!)
A four hour wait to be seen for 20 seconds can lead to extreme actions and that's why the Agency has "Security"(lol) staff on the door.
I gave up - walked out of the building and posted the form in the letter box outside! (no postage just the envelope with the form) three days later we got a reciept of form notification.
I can really understand the frustration of the chap in question, according to all the papers he'd tried the usual channels had the constant ringing or engaged tone, been transferred from department to department only to finish up back at a receptionist who is only fielding phone calls to send to someone else. If the story is genuine then good look to him, if it's not genuine then good luck to the person who has highlighted the farcical situation in the Benefits Office lets hope that someone in authority see's this and actually does something about it.

Fortunately we rarely deal with UK benefits or tax offices but when we do, oh wow the engaged phone! I had one elderly lady who used to live in the UK, came back to Jersey when she was widowed and that was the root of her problem. She was in receipt of a very small amount of income from the UK and the Inland Revenue (tax office) sent her tax returns each year, she didn't understand the late filing fee of £100 and assumed this was her tax bill so sent it to them each year. Finally she came to us, I contacted the tax people who wanted about six tax returns completed before they would refund this money. The problem really started when I tried to contact the UK department which paid her widows' pension to ask how much she had received each year so we could complete the forms, it took several weeks before I finally got answered, mostly the line was engaged. When I finally got through they told me they would give the information ONCE and only once, she had been notified at the time and they had better things to do. Sheesh! Yes, she got all her 'tax' refunded and the promise that they would never send her another tax form to complete as she doesn't earn enough to pay tax AND she is not liable to pay UK tax anyway as she isn't a resident of the UK.