The council is full of morons

In London (and I assume that applies for most of the UK), people have to pay council tax according to their housing standards. Why this isn't done less annoyingly by an equal spread and through the general tax is beyond me, but it exist nevertheless. It wouldn't be such a big problem, if the people in the council managed not to cock up.

I'm happily sharing a flat and I'm also happily tax-exempt being full-time exploited as research-bitch. To my knowledge that relationship has been confirmed by this neat letter of student confirmation when I moved last year. Then, out of the blue sky, a council tax enquiry letter asked for details [1]. Not nicely, but with the bold threat [2] that I'd have to pay £50 if I didn't reply on time. Being a good EU citizen, I complied, not knowing that those idiots had already closed my flatmates account (which comfortably ran via monthly direct debit) and started billing me for the complete previous year! Imbeciles.

Three phone-calls [3] and half an hour (!) later, we (the moron and I) had finally established the above status quo. Sigh, now I'll have to send them another student status confirmation...

[1] The form was full of typos and errors. Who's typing these things? Monkeys?
[2] I should have ignored it. After some time the TV people stopped sending us letters as well. I presume they ran out of red ink, as the letters turned progressively more colourful.
[3] To be fair enough, only one made it successfully past the automatic band machine. Funky music. Word of advice: don't call, if you only have 10min time between some wash steps in the lab.