Revenue & Customs reported this week that it had cleared a backlog that had built up in its self assessment processing systems after carrying out maintenance on its mainframe systems.
An HRMC spokesman confirmed that no returns were processed until the CESA mainframe was re-instated on 25 April. "This is a normal, routine occurrence that occurs most years," he said.
Returns submitted online while the backroom systems were unavailable were queued up within the Revenue's Validation Engine for submission when CESA was brought back into action, the official said.
A considerable backlog built up when CESAR was brought back online but was flushed out over the bank holiday weekend.
AccountingWEB members and participants at the recent Digita user conference in Stratford noted anomalies when using SA online and noted repayments and acknowledgements weren't appearing as expected.
"Are the current PAYE online problems having an effect on online self assessment tax return processing?" asked AccountingWEB member Marcella Shone on 26 April.
Another member, S Angus said the Online Technical Helpdesk told him that 2005 tax returns filed online would not be processed before 26 April 2005.
While confirming HMRC that maintenance work had taken place on 23-24 April, HMRC has yet to explain the lack of return processing before that weekend. An official said an explanation and chronology would be provided shortly.
On Tuesday 3 May, the HMRC website was temporarily unavailable for an hour "due to a fault in the text alert function", TaxZone reported.