For the past week, our online CT600 submissions have been rejected with an error message about the IR Mark being incorrect. According to the report we get out of IRIS, the IR Mark looks normal but there is no entry for the time. IRIS says it is a known fault, the Online Services Helpdesk say it is a known fault and the website Service Issues page says that the Revenue are working with their IT partners to resolve the issue.
Is this problem specific to IRIS?
Has anyone been able to find out when the problem is likely to be solved?
Euan MacLennan
Replies (8)
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Iris CT Submission
The only similar problem that I have encountered with Iris is that it or HMRC don't like certain characters. For example Bob's business fails because of the apostrophe, but if removed and sent as Bobs business it is accepted.
Online CT600 filing problem
Don't know if this is of any help, as I use a different CT filing software to Iris, but on contacting the HMRC Technical Helpdesk on some recurrent filing failures, I was advised there was often a problem with file names for the pdf accounts and computations attachments & that the IR software required the file names to be alphanumeric characters only, all lower case with no gaps & since adopting this approach, have much reducde filing difficulties.
It is a problem at HMRC's end
It should technically affect all software as it is a problem at the HMRC end. Problems were experienced during the week before last and they seem to have had a knock on effect.
the hmrc have always been funny about certain characters
My particular favourite was when they decided not to allow £ and % in additional information. This is for tax returns isn't it ! Everything in attachments however should go through fine as long as there are no funnies in the filename (what the relevance of the filename is to the HMRC I really don't know - perhaps they are hoping for some clues - so don't store the pdfs in a folder called DodgyStuff !)
Funny characters causing a problem - do you blame it on the HMRC for not accepting them or the software not spotting them and warning you.
CT filing
I also experienced difficulty recently with an error message appearing relating to "the address", but not indicating where the problem was located i.e. in the body of HMRC's return or in the attachments.
The online helpdesk advised that the apostrophe which appears in our town - Bo'ness - should be deleted from the online return. This suggestion actually worked, though strangely enough the same address in the attachments didn't cause any problems.
Error 2021 resolution
It makes a change not to be one of the first to experience a problem! Strangely only one out of a dozen Returns I have filed using third party software has been affected!
The issue appears to have been resolved following some changes by HMRC last night, less than 12 hours after I reported experiencing this problem to the help desk.
The seperate issue of illegal characters in the file naming conventions of attachments arose over a year ago, in that the HMRC server suddenly decided that it would not accept file names with an apostrophe, or other illegal characters. I would imagine that this will apply with any attachment filed through any of the SA systems.