Every local councill has a different payment system for colecting councill tax, and all of them fail in novel and unpredictable ways.
Last time they collected my name and address over the phone and got both of them wrong.
Then they were sending letter to a person that doesn't exist, to an address that doesnt exist, never used my email or phone number, didn't respond to my email, but still told me it's my fault!
I had the fun experience of my local (UK, major city) council sending debt collectors after me for non-payment of council tax while simultaneously (literally same week) asking what bank account to send the several thousand pounds they owed me for overpayment - because they failed to acknowledge that despite having moved address, I was still the same person, and their systems treated each address as an account not each person. They still told me it was my fault.
This is the difference between “council tax” a tax on property and “poll tax” a tax on individual people, and that went quite badly when it was tried... So it makes sense for the primary accounts to be per property. However you are quite right they should have a better understanding of a second layer of accounts being individual people.
The IT infrastructure around tax/HMRC is ridiculously complex. The “making tax digital” initiative is trying to fix that. The aim for business taxes, for example, is that each individual business will have a single tax account eventually, rather than separate once for each tax type as they currently do.
In the world of councils, an address is an account.
They just need to make sure that every address is paid for every day of the year - that's the way they maximize their revenue. They don't really who pays, as long as someone does. Hence the account system keyed on address.
You pay council tax on your address, not on an individual basis. So if you moved house and didn't tell them, they quite reasonably would have counted the payments towards your old address, not your new one.
I did tell them, the person I told said I could keep my automatic payments going, which I did for a year before they said I hadn't paid a year on the new address and had overpaid a year on the old address.
They then denied knowing that I had moved address, but didn't have an answer to "then why have you sent me a letter (to my new address) saying the payments for the old address should be refunded if you think I still live there?" (they literally denied knowing I had moved after sending the letters).
I appreciate that involved human incompetence not just a poor IT system, but a better system would have made the updating of me as a person paying council tax from one address to another seamless, then it would have flagged the problem sooner than a year in, and then it could have crossed my "debt" with my "overpayment" rather than passing it (in what I assume was another human mistake, but again allowed by the system) to a debt collection agency.
Last time they collected my name and address over the phone and got both of them wrong.
Then they were sending letter to a person that doesn't exist, to an address that doesnt exist, never used my email or phone number, didn't respond to my email, but still told me it's my fault!