WHAT DO YOU THINK: Is the self assessment system working?

Lets look at a different way. Lets assume the deadline date is wrong and suggest a date of 31st March for Tax Returns and half yearly date of 31st October for second on account payments.
Firstly 31st March. A Very sensible date. Tax payers have got over paying the xmas bills and have not yet spent too much on summer holidays. Similarly 31st October is sensible. Tax payers have more or less got over their summer hols and not thought too much about xmas. Oh yes and it gives agents 12 months to get everybodies Tax return in. Sounds very sensible to me, but then HMRC won't allow their staff to make sensible decisions will they????

Personally I find that the mechanical problems of agent authorisation, online filing and deadline compliance are a lesser issue compared with the lack of certainty in tax law to enable a taxpayer to self assess an accurate liability without exposure to negligence and at the same time without voluntarily paying more tax than the law requires.

It's only 8 January but I can't access SA online at the moment. Filed a couple of returns before 10 this morning, but since then, can't access the site.

Doesn't bode well for the rest of the month.

I can't get in either. I've timed out accessing the Revenue portal to check a client's account balance, and the tax returns that I've just tried to submit haven't gone through.

Is it too much to ask the Revenue system to cope with perfectly predicatable levels of demand? Apparently it is. No doubt they'll helpfully suggest that I try to use their site sometime after dinner tonight.

I discovered today that if you submit an online tax return with a change of client address, this is not picked up by HMRC from the electronic return. This only came to light when a client failed to receive his tax refund which had been sent to his previous address.

Chris

HMRC have just posted the following on their website which may answer Peter and David's comments made earlier today:

"We are currently experiencing problems with this service and this is affecting all Self Assessment customers.

We are not currently able to provide an acknowledgement that your return has been successfully received, even if it has been. Your software will continue to check the status of your submission and there is no need to resubmit your return. Please leave 24 hours before checking for our acknowledgement of receipt.

We are currently working with our IT provider and giving this our urgent attention.

This also affects users of third party software.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause."

I am not sure why it always takes so long for them to get round to acknowledging there is a problem with the service though.

Mind you, in the past they would always swear blind there were no problems. At least now they are prepared to own up to them.

Guess we will just have to wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Chris, I understood that the system will pick up changes on address, but you must ensure that the box in Q21 is ticked. Just changing the address on the front page isn't enough.

Thank you for alerting us to the HMRC statement, John.

As I have said elsewhere, I think Revenue officials do pay attention to helpline complaints (and monitor AccountingWEB comments). And in this instance, they acknowledged the issue within 12 hours of us first hearing about it. As you mention, that is a good sign of progress.

More worrying is the echo of the nature of the site's behaviour, which has mild echoes of the problems experienced in 2005, when the SA portal never actually crashed, but big bottlenecks built up in sending out acknowledgements.

This is pure surmise on my part at the moment, but we will be in contact with HMRC first thing to get an update on the situation.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

I've woken early today so thought I'd file a couple of returns - surely the Revenue website will be extra fast at this time. All was well for 2 returns, but now "the System is busy". Can the Revenue advise when we can file returns without their system failing - we are told to avoid peak office hours & I'm trying to follow their advice.

Two returns submitted, but no email acknowledgement, just a note from our software that "The Government Gateway has acknowledged receipt but is unable to issue confirmation of the status of the Tax Return at the present time"

I'm sure quite a few people would welcome online submission forms for the non-Personal tax returns - just an online version of the paper ones (e.g. SA850) would be good enough, rather than having to fork out for / install & get to grips with 3rd party software, especially if doing 'last minute' work at the weekend.

[The US appears to have open-source software for their tax submission - let's hope it's not too long before we get some simple o-s packages for vanilla returns over here.]

This is a bit confusing - I just visited HMRC and it says 'all's well' - so was this a temporary issue or has it been resolved?

...lies the shadow.

I hope TS Eliot wouldn't mind me adapting one of his lines to describe the current situation. Officially we were told on Tuesday evening that the problem has been identified and fixed - as we document in the follow-up article to this Question of the Week item.

A couple of subsequent comments indicate that everything may not be resolved yet - one member is awaiting acknowledgements from returns filed in December and two others are getting complex error codes (one from SA Online, one from PAYE Online).

As has been the case in the past, AccountingWEB members are very good at alerting us to any difficulties they are experiencing - and I will continue to liaise with HMRC to elicit more detailed explanations.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

Do these problems augur well for the first CIS online filing in May which will also be at the peak of the P35 filing period :-(