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<b>Technology News:</b> PAYE online draws praise from software industry. By John Stokdyk

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27th Apr 2006
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The software trade body BASDA this week broke the habit of a lifetime and issued a statement praising HM Revenue & Customs for coping well during the crucial early weeks of the 2006 online PAYE filing season.

The current rules allow a six-week window from 6 April to 19 May for companies to file their P14 and P35 annual returns. As part of a migration to an all online system, companies with 50 employees or more are now required to file online. Mandatory online filing will come for small companies in 2008, but they are also being encouraged to file online with a £250 incentive.

BASDA CEO Dennis Keeling said PAYE software developers including Sage and Pegasus had reported no problems so far and that millions of individual P14s have been successfully filed.

Kevin Hart, who looks after Sage's strategic relationship with the government, said: "Given the significant challenges arising from HMRC's problems last year, we had to plan for the worse, but have been delighted with both the performance of HMRC's online filing service along with its early opening to help those monthly payroll businesses who were ready to submit after mid-March.

"We have even received a number of un-solicited e-mails and calls from customers citing how pleased they were with the whole e-filing payroll year end experience."

Pegasus managing director Gary Turner, too, said he was "pleasantly surprised" to see that the system coped with submissions that peaked at over 30,000 P14s on the first two days of filing.

"This is a fantastic and worthwhile application of contemporary web technology in industry," Turner said. "The cost and efficiency savings for both businesses and the government should be enormous. We calculated that Pegasus customers saved the paper equivalent of approximately 500 trees by opting to file their P14's online this year."

Speaking at the AccountingWEB CIS breakfast briefing this week, BASDA's chief executive said he was encouraged by a real culture change taking place within HMRC and that the department recognised the importance of extended testing to ensure their systems would work properly.

He explained: "Over the past 12 months, we have worked very closely with HMRC to iron out the problems and, this year, they responded positively to our request to provide full end-to-end testing facilities before the date when returns were due to commence. That has proved particularly important in ensuring that the whole programme has gone smoothly. It allowed the software developers to further verify their systems before enabling the customers to send their data, minimising the risk of any submission rejections and the resulting overheads for their customers."

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By kipper01
03rd May 2006 16:02

Problem with HMCE's own on-line PAYE filing
My experience is different: for some reason HMRC's website won't accept my P14/P35 filing submission for 05/06 even though I am using their own software and successfully submitted this way in earlier years.

I logged-in with my digital certificate and completed the forms but they have been rejected with a 6010 error..something about "sender details/id authentication". Now although I can log in I can't get to the area where I created the forms without getting a "system busy" message.

I reported this to the HMRC helpdesk several weeks ago and they are still awaiting a Head Office reply as 19 May rapidly approaches...anyone else had this problem?

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