The Inland Revenue has apologised for threatening to seize goods from an innocent company after a Y2K glitch. The tax office believed the unnamed firm had not paid its tax and national insurance contributions, and threatened to send the bailiffs round. The Bradford Midland Tax District Office blamed "computer faults at this end", according to a report in Computing, a weekly UK IT newspaper. EDS are currently fixing the Y2K problems at the office. An Inland Revenue spokesman admitted the threatening letter was sent out during a system crash caused by EDS' Infrastructure 2000 project. "Bradford has experienced quite a lot of downtime so we sent out some letters even though we could not access the records," he said. The Inland Revenue also said that this was not the only company to have been threatened with debt collection due to Millennium bug problems. In a letter leaked to Computing, other tax offices were said to have been hit. "I cannot give details of our Year 2000 measures and progress as you will appreciate that this is confidential, government-sensitive, information," said the letter. "But I can say that the above measures are causing extreme problems with the Inland Revenue... and have been for several weeks now." ®