AccountingWeb

HMRC: Online agent authorisation problems resolved

After a week of disruption, HMRC said on Tuesday afternoon that it had resolved authentication failures that had been affecting certain taxpayers. John Stokdyk reports.

AccountingWEB members Dave Evans and P Watkin first raised the issue last week, which was later confirmed when HMRC's SA service availability page reported an "intermittent problem affecting customers using the Online Agent Authorisation service". The department's IT partners spent the rest of the week investigating and informed software developers on Friday.

AccountingWEB member Alan Moore logged in on Friday morning and discovered he was no longer listed as an agent for corporation tax clients. Teresa discovered similar problems on Monday morning.

Come Tuesday, another AccountingWEB member privately informed us, "I did manage to get online on Friday morning and enter the 64-8 code, but cannot get on today to enter a different one."

The member filed two self-assessment returns online on Thursday with Sage tax software, but these were rejected for not having recognised agent codes.

"When we phoned Sage on Friday we couldn't get through to their software support either! Exasperated I phoned Sage sales who said that their support had been swamped with calls because of the HMRC online problems," the member said.

According to a comment from AccountingWEB member Dave Smith, an email bulletin went out to developers on Tuesday to say the issue had been resolved. The Service Availability page confirmed: "We are aware that some customers were receiving a 1046 error message when filing their online tax return. This error has now been resolved."

Software developers reported a surge in authentication failures last week. Digita client services manager Peter Greenslade said the company knew something was wrong when its servers started picking up "bucketloads" of authentication failures.

"We usually get advance warning because clients are on phone if things are not right," Greenslade said. "We did refer them to HMRC's Helpdesk, but unfortunately until the second line technical teams have verified anything, the Helpdesk tends to be in denial mode.

"As far as dissemination of information within HRMC goes, it can take a while for them to be informed."

Software developers like Digita can help alert the department to problems by bringing the issue up with their contacts on HMRC's software development teams, he added.

Sage also reported an increase in support calls and emails and received the bulletin from HMRC's software developers support team on Friday. The gave a brief overview of the problem, but not in sufficient detail for the Sage support team to understand exactly what the problem was. "We were only able to determine that it affected user credentials," the company reported.

According to Sage, updating HMRC's service issues page after the issue was resolved doesn't really help commercial developers support their clients. "The discrepancy between what customers can see and the little we are told leads to some confusion as to where faults lie as customers can say 'there is nothing on the HMRC website about this,'" Sage said.

However the company did say HMRC was better at keeping taxpayers and developers better informed about scheduled maintenance. During what is a relatively quiet period, the HMRC website is going through a period of upgrade work to make the underlying infrastructure more robust. After off-line servicing last Thursday and over the bank holiday weekend, more work is scheduled for the evening of Monday 1 September. See the HMRC Online service availability page for full details.

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