Incorrect Generic non-filing notice

Incorrect Generic non-filing notice

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I processed an annual FPS at the end of April for my two person payroll using Basic Tools. Since then I have submitted nil EPS's each month.  I last submitted a nil EPS on 8th December for the month ended 5th December and I received a successful submission confirmation by email from HMRC. 

Today I received a generic notification stating that I have failed to submit either a FPS (as expected by HMRC?!) or a nil EPS  for the month ended 5th December .  Has anyone else received an incorrect notification? Should I take any action or ignore it?

Replies (22)

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By Wieslaw
12th Dec 2013 06:40

See HMRC latest news
 http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/news/news101213.htm Non-filing message exceptions

There are two instances where an employer may receive a non-filing message although they have filed on time.

These are:

when an FPS has been sent in advance for this tax year - for example, a sole director/employee planning to take the same earnings each month may have submitted 12 FPS in April for the full yearwhere HMRC has received an Employer Payment Summary (EPS) before 14 October 2013 that reports a 'period for inactivity' - for example, if an employer has sent an EPS in August 2013 to report a period of inactivity from September 2013 to February 2014

IMO - call the employer helpline and get them to map the data over to the file. The data has been received but is sat on one server not talking to the other... This should have been sorted with the OCT updates, but maybe not...

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By katrinakilcoyne
12th Dec 2013 13:13

Same problem!

Surely we should not have to call the Employers Helpline about this, for agents this is far too much work.  Most of our payrolls are for director/employees earning the same figure each month and so the FPS is filed quarterly in advance. 

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By katrinakilcoyne
12th Dec 2013 13:18

Cessation payroll also not noted!

A cessation payroll was also submitted in June 2013 and FPS return has been requested for 5 December.  I am dreading the senario of penalties from April 2014!  HMRC are not ready!

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By norstar
12th Dec 2013 13:27

HMRC don't know their own RTI rules

My payroll manager is tearing her hair out with this as well. You can't file a nil FPS, so you file an EPS stating no payments after 5th but before the 19th of the following month.

We're now getting this ridiculous message of "non filing" and worse still, the HMRC officers we've spoken to argue the issue. In the end we printed off their own guidance and sent it to them whereupon they backed down.

This is totally unacceptable. Never mind 2016, the penalties should be scrapped until 3016 by which time HMRC might even know their own rules and have fixed the system!

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By John R
12th Dec 2013 13:34

One for Rebecca Benneyworth maybe - this is getting ridiculous

Yesterday, one of my staff spent over an hour trying to query why we had received about eight of these notices relating to the period ended 5 December 2013. In every case an FPS had been submitted on time. In the end after speaking to three different people who could not explain the reason for the issue of the notices she was being put through to someone else when her call was cut off, so we got nowhere. Then I received a copy of the daily CCH update which linked to the HMRC news item referred to above. All the cases fell within the first exception above so no further action is required.

Today we received a further batch of notices and two of them are in respect of cases which do not fall within either exception but FPSs or EPSs were submitted on time.

So presumably there are other exceptions. We shall now have to spend more time on the telephone with HMRC trying to establish the problem and presumably we shall keep receiving these notices which by their nature have to be investigated individually in case there really is a problem!

Thank goodness the notices weren't sent to the clients.

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By Kazmc
12th Dec 2013 13:57

...

Well I have just logged on and since Monday there are another 13 generic notifications so I now have to waste my time (and the clients money) going through them all to work out why they have been issued!! Just by a quick scan I can see that 2 of them are for payrolls who have ceased trading this year (we have sent final EPS's) and another few who haven't used PAYE refs for years! This is in addition to the 20 or so already received since the generic notifications started. This is painful.....

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By Wieslaw
12th Dec 2013 14:07

Tax doesn't have to be taxing but HMRC systems do!

One of our clients called HMRC, as we told them "If HMRC actually looked beyond their first screen, they will find the data, but will have to import it manually to rectify" 

The client wrote back to us shortly after...

All done! The adviser at HMRC said she could see that the final RTI submission based on a cessation date of 31 August hadn't been mapped over from one system to another!

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Giraffe
By Luke
12th Dec 2013 14:24

Yep, more here

and the worst bit was getting through on the automated phone line.  Why oh why can they not understand 'agent' when I say it, admittedly I was shouting it the third time!!

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Replying to almost_a_geek:
RLI
By lionofludesch
13th Dec 2013 10:28

Language

Luke wrote:

and the worst bit was getting through on the automated phone line.  Why oh why can they not understand 'agent' when I say it, admittedly I was shouting it the third time!!

 

You're using wrong language.  Try Double Dutch.

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By norstar
12th Dec 2013 16:10

Another like Wieslaw

I should also mention that we've had problems with them being able to map 4 weekly payrolls into their pay periods and mapping across EPS filings.

One client pays PAYE and NIC every time the payroll is run (so thirteen payments a year). HMRC got confused with this and so shuffled the whole lot into last year and Q1, then sent debt management out chasing Q2's PAYE, even though the whole lot reconciled to the penny. Their system just can't handle four weekly payroll submissions so they said "BUT IT SHOULD BE QUARTERLY PAYE!!!". Doesn't have to be chum - it "can be".

Meanwhile the debt office have been chasing ghosts (or rather my client) because "their system doesn't have the updated figures from the EPS's" for a client with SMP recovery. They're therefore chasing the tax and NI arising on the payroll and threatening nasty things to a mum on maternity leave just because the SMP recovery hasn't mapped across...

The last HMRC lady we spoke to didn't even know what an EPS was. Happy days.

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By Andrew Lee
16th Dec 2013 13:14

They are aware of the issue!

We spoke to HMRC last week about this very issue having received a number of similar non-filing notices and after being transferred about three times we eventually spoke to someone who said HMRC are aware of the problem and are looking into it and apologised for the inconvenience it has caused.  We do not therefore propose to spend any further time contacting them where we hold confirmation on file that the FPS has been submitted "on or before" payment has been made, as this is a complete waste of our time.  Hopefully, they will resolve the issue soon, but problems such as these should be communicated to all relevant HMRC staff and the public as soon as they are known instead of being spread by word of mouth!

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By Eric T
16th Dec 2013 14:14

I received 19 generic Non-Filing Notices last week - every single one of them in respect of submissions I had already made and for which I have acknowledgements from HMRC.

 

I am at a total loss as to whether I need to be doing something about this.

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By pauljohnston
16th Dec 2013 14:48

Agent Helpline advice

I rang the Agents Helpline because of the problems above.  I was advised to re-dial and say nothing.  After a bit the system transfrred mer to an agent.

HMRC Staff say they are having a nightmare with the new spoken sytem, I note you can not request a payment for time wasting.

HMRC if you are reading this please give agents a phone line with the old system.  Ie Press 1 for this etc.

We generally know what we want to talk to you about.

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Replying to Portia Nina Levin:
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By arthvirg230
16th Dec 2013 14:54

a little hint with the automated answering....

I have found that if you tell the automated telephone system to "F*** Off" you go straight through to an operator..... they must have considered that when programming the system!

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Replying to Michaelaizquierdo:
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By martin.curtis
18th Dec 2013 09:20

automated answering

arthvirg230 wrote:

I have found that if you tell the automated telephone system to "F*** Off" you go straight through to an operator..... they must have considered that when programming the system!

 

I don't know if this is true or not but it did make me laugh out loud. Just what I needed after receiving a handful of spurious 'generic notices'

 

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By Jimess
18th Dec 2013 15:27

Another problem is....

We have just had an HMRC operator tell us they could not discuss the generic late filing notice we received for a particular client as he could not see any 64-8 details on screen for us. The 64-8 and FBI-2 were lodged at HMRC in May 2013, the late filing notice came in to our HMRC client services communications area yesterday AND we spoke to another HMRC operator on an RTI matter for the same client last week and previously in October with no 64-8 problems at all. When I pointed all of this out to the operator all he said was that as HE could not see any 64-8 details he could not assist.  How are we supposed to help our client now? Gawd help us if the HMRC system is dropping 64-8 details off as well! 

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By derdle
18th Dec 2013 15:50

Sick and tired

I must say that i am sick and tired of receiving these generic non-filing notices.

All of my payrolls are reported on time and obviously have the responses - why can't HMRC suspend the issue of these notices until such time that they have rectified the program bug?

What is going to happen after 6 April 2014?

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RLI
By lionofludesch
19th Dec 2013 13:48

Appeals ?

I know that it's not an immediate issue but there's no dispute procedure shown on these notices.

How do you challenge these notices? Ring ?  Write ?  Email ?

In the meantime, I'm just filing them, with a printout of the dates I submitted the returns.

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By Eric T
19th Dec 2013 15:14

More arrived today.

 

Not a peep from HMRC so far.

 

Do they realise they have a problem?

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By Jimess
19th Dec 2013 17:15

@Derdle

We have been waiting for HMRC to correct a program bug that affected the way payments on account were dealt with last year if the client elected for payment via coding but for whatever reason that could not happen therefore POA's also become due as usual - the only way HMRC could get the POA's on to the system in such situations was to create in year assessments and make notes on record. As you might guess this also does not bring the payments on account actually paid into this years calculations. Almost a year on from that debacle I have been told today by HMRC not to expect any fixes to the system on that particular issue until after 6 February 2014.  If it takes them that long to fix glitches I suspect that HMRC's tech team probably would not get around to fixing this particular RTI generic filing notice glitch until well after the 2014/15 tax year is through. 

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By derdle
19th Dec 2013 19:41

I have actually written a letter of complaint about this issue now.

No doubt I'll receive a reply in February.

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By User deleted
19th Dec 2013 20:09

@ derdle

That soon?! Or were you referring to 2015? :)

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