Making a mountain out of a toll bill
Graeme Ellis of Swanley ask for a receipt for his London congestion charge, and had over 3,000 of them delivered to his letterbox.
When Graeme Ellis incurred the £8 London Congestion Charge, he paid online using the Transport for London website. When he asked for a receipt, he didn't expect the postman to stagger up to his house a few days later and deliver 500 of them. And he certainly didn't expect that to be followed by a Royal Mail van delivering a further 3,000 receipts packed into four cardboard boxes.
Transport for London issued a statement which said: "This is clearly an unacceptable error. Our service provider, Capita, has identified the fault and put in additional controls to ensure it does not happen in future."
I'm not sure what those controls might be. You'd think that having so many receipts that they needed to find four boxes to carry them all might already have been enough of a clue that something had gone badly wrong.
16th April 2008