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HMRC manuals move to GOV.UK

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22nd Jul 2014
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HMRC wants to know what tax advisers think about its employment income manuals which have been recently moved to new government portal GOV.UK.

The Revenue has been moving its online content across to the new platform since 2012.

The employment income manual, which HMRC says has been tested by tax professionals, is accurate up to 8 May 2014.

“We know that there are some problems with the content as a result of doing a very quick low-tech migration, so you may see some unusual characters appear in the titles,” HMRC said.

“For example – stars instead of bold text; broken tables etc. None of these will be present when the HMRC manuals fully move to GOV.UK, so you don’t need to report them.”

The Revenue wants feedback on how easy it is to find the information in the new format and how tax advisers prefer to stay up to date with changes to HMRC's information.

When GOV.UK was first launched in 2012, some AccountingWEB members weren’t initially impressed with the design or content. 

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Replies (6)

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By SThornton
22nd Jul 2014 16:23

Are they still not impressed with it?

I still don't like it but then its as user friendly as the old one!

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By Ruddles
22nd Jul 2014 16:49

Printing?

With the existing manuals it is easy to print individual pages. This doesn't seem to be the case with the new version (you can probably get round it by selecting the text and "print selection" but if they want to be user-friendly then they ought to provide a "print page" option).

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By alan.rolfe
23rd Jul 2014 09:28

Official feedback channel

The Revenue have an official channel to give feedback during the transition to the Gov.UK website.  For more details see https://taxagents.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/26/employment-income-manual-comments-invited-on-a-new-format/

I believe that it is important to give this feedback, such as about missing print facilities, as otherwise it is hardly fair to complain later when the site is more complete and when functions are still missing.

Hopefully the web team will be open to these suggestions!

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By johnjenkins
23rd Jul 2014 10:07

Instead of

spending umpteen mills on IT why don't HMRC ask us how things should be done right from the start.

Thanks (4)
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By scedwar
29th Jul 2014 17:27

@johnjenkins: HMRC did ask for feedback right from the very start of the process, you can see details of the user needs workshops with users last year on this blog post: https://hmrctransition.blog.gov.uk/2014/03/03/hmrc-manuals-on-gov-uk/

@alan.rolfe & @ruddles Printing individual pages and printing a whole section or group of pages were identified in the user needs workshops linked to above. If you look at the prototype designs on this page you can see buttons printing for printing a whole section, or just individual pages:  https://hmrctransition.blog.gov.uk/2013/09/11/hmrc-manuals/

The existing Employment Income manual is an Alpha release, so it won't be feature complete and those features should come in later releases. You can read more about what it means to be an alpha release in the Government service design manual: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

Finally, I would urge everyone to send in their feedback using the official channels as this should be taken into account during the beta development and continued development once live. 

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By johnjenkins
30th Jul 2014 09:42

@scedwar

You said it all. "Should be taken into account".

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