Online tax repayments await April website upgrade

Accountants and taxpayers wanting to request repayments online for excess amounts of tax will have to wait for at least two weeks before they can do so. John Stokdyk reports

AccountingWEB member Phil Rees first raised the issue on 18 March when he was unable to access Self Assessment Online. Returning to the portal the following day, he reported getting a message saying that tax had been overpaid and that an amount was available for repayment.

Clicking on the "Request a repayment" button generated the response: "Your Self Assessment records show you have no amounts available for repayment."

When he clicked on the "Ask a question" link, the system logged him out. Ken Howard reported a similar experience, while and Thomas Peterson had been told by the online help desk that HMRC was aware of the repayment problem and was working on it.

Two days later, Graham Bell went through the same process and was informed by the help team of the current SA service availability advice: "Following the scheduled upgrade to the online service on the 6 February 2008 HMRC are aware that there are some problems with the online requests.

"The repayment request function is currently unavailable and our IT partners have investigated the problem and a resolution has been identified. This will be implemented in April 2008. HMRC apologises for any inconvenience caused.

"In the meantime if you are experiencing difficulties with this you may
wish to contact the Tax office to claim the repayment."

As previously reported on AccountingWEB, April will see "significant improvements" to the SA Online portal. In addition to new tax return forms and site layouts, the backroom servers are also being upgraded. Alongside these planned changes will be a bug-fix for the online repayment system, HMRC said.

A doubtful Phil Rees commented in reply: "Forgive me if I change my name to Thomas."