THE MILLENNIUM bug has bitten for the first time in East Lancashire - sending a tax system haywire despite a council spending £200,000 to protect itself.

The year 2000-related computer problem, which has had little impact on most of Britain, created difficulties for people trying to pay their council tax bills in Hyndburn.

Hyndburn Council today admitted some of its computers had fallen foul of the bug - even though it spent £200,000 last year trying to safeguard against it.

An elderly woman in Oswaldtwistle was told of the millennium bug problem when she tried to pay her council tax bill at the town hall yesterday. The pensioner was told her payment could not be registered on the computer system because the computers would not recognise the correct date. She was offered a handwritten receipt, but refused to pay until her payment could be registered properly.

Many computer programs are designed to deal with dates beginning with 1 and 9 as the first two digits, and the date change can cause systems to malfunction.

A council spokesman said: "We suffered a minor Y2K problem at our area offices which took about an hour to rectify. The problem was that five of our personal computers did not recognise the date change.

"But given that the council uses more than 400 PCs, it was a minor problem. The system is now up and running and we're confident we have squashed the millennium bug dead."

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