HMRC VAT APIs fall over on deadline day
Regular grumbles from accountants about the functioning of HMRC’s Making Tax Digital for VAT program interfaces cropped up again on Tuesday as accountants were unable to file returns on the last day of the quarter.
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If you have views about MTD for VAT and want to ensure that those views are heard by those who will make the decisions about MTD roll-out to other taxes, take part in this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/VXBTDPD.
The CIOT and ATT are gathering data from thw survey until Monday 13 Janaury, which they will use to present the real story about MTD to HMRC.
My question is - how are the other software vendors able to give you the Returns then? Even with the link being down/broken.....
Hmm... not sure I quite agree with Xero's interpretation of having "authorisation" last time I checked it was something that a client granted to an agent and not to an individual employee of the agent... Xero certainly understand the concept of a practice and a practice user so I think it would be perfectly reasonable to argue if someone is 1) a practice user, 2) authorised to access the client in Xero, 3) also has rights to the VAT return section of that client and 4) that client's VAT number is linked to that practice's ASA and the practice has a 64-8 (or the equivalent) then that user would be deemed to meet the "authorised". I suspect the crux of it is this bit "MTD VAT in Xero is a live ‘real time’ link" and they simply haven't written it to do anything else like keep a cached copy of the information "locally" and are now trying to justify it on the basis of "security" as who can really argue about that - after all what are we really talking about here? A list of open/available VAT periods that HMRC have "issued" a virtual VAT100 form.
Thinking back to the start of the whole MTD and move to ASA process as far as I know HMRC basically said "we know our existing client delegation to staff function sucks so badly its basically unworkable for pretty much everyone with more than the smallest of list of clients to deal with so pretty much everyone else uses shared logins at office or agent level. A better approach is we will move to a very minimal web presence for agents, link everything at a practice level to a single really secure centrally managed identity (the ASA) and then publish everything via an API accessible in Line of Business software and then let the practice software vendors deal with things like staff groups, client groups on the basis that they probably already have that set up to secure the client data, or at least filter in the LOB product or you might be able to leverage existing identity groups from things like an Active Directory or Azure"
It would be really interesting to know what changed; whether it came from the HMRC side, or was more the software industry refusing to play ball with what HMRC was hoping for and taking the view they shouldn't sort out the failing with the broken HMRC security model and be expected to pick up the bill, and shouldn't have to develop a agent and a non-agent authentication platform - and I suspect in some part as a matter of principle as MTD was basically a dirty word.
I have my suspicion is was perhaps the latter as the whole introduction of additional users for access to a practice's ASA seemed very rushed and an afterthought as if HMRC suddenly realised that their vision for a single central authorisation per product once every 18 months wasn't going to be delivered and by basically mandating the introduction of 2FA the fall back of anyone contemplating using a single login was utterly unviable alongside the move to a single practice wide ASA linked to the firm's UTR that could cover 10-15 office.
Whatever you might think of the rest of MTD around things like digital record keeping and digital data transfers between products a lot of what HMRC from a technical perspective said they wanted to do from what I can see was fairly sound and well intended to deliver a business fit for the future and the world we live in today. What we seem to now have is a "toxic" product that so tainted the mere utterance of the letters M-T-D probably doom anything to failure, resistance and refusal - warranted or not.
Not sure I agree with Tim's comments here. We have delegated access to our ASA, with each member of staff having their own credentials. However, this causes massive issues for staff who share responsibility for VAT returns and constantly have to re-authorise the software if they log into a client on Xero after a previous colleague has done so.
So far, trying again tomorrow has avoided wasting my life on the phone.
MTD really is a pile of crap.
All I will say is this constant reauthentication is perhaps slightly more preferable that one of than Xero's earlier attempt at practice wide ASA token storage with no way of telling it to reauthenticate or "forget me" … lets just say we had a member of staff put in a client's Government Gateway credentials during the pilot and Xero was then attempting to access the MTD for VAT API for the entire practice using one clients details... and as the tokens themselves were "valid" just not authorised for other clients Xero wasn't forcing a reauthentication. Nearly 4 week later of escalations and blaming HMRC we finally managed to get Xero to strip out the required details and in the mean time their work around was for staff to sign up and be granted access with another email address (.com rather than .co.uk) so they weren't then seen as practice users.
To be fair part of this was probably not entirely 100% Xero's responsibility; they perhaps didn't expect someone to enter anything other than ASA credentials for a practice account - although perhaps they should have forsee it. That said we discovered in the process of this move to MTD one office we had taken over every single client our predecessors had setup to file VAT using "business" credentials rather than linking them to a agent account for VAT and the staff had blindly continued doing it that way knowing no different... and then we discovered one of them when prompted to setup 2FA on a number of these account has done so to their personal mobile... and then left the firm!
The problems with HMRC's API compounded an issue which had already been created when Quickbooks Online's systems failed on Monday afternoon. From lunchtime on Monday it had been impossible to login to Quickbooks, which just gave gateway errors. When I tried to login at 8:00pm on Monday evening Intuit had closed Quickbooks down altogether.
Hence I was already playing catch-up on Tuesday morning when I was able to access Quickbooks, to find that HMRC MTD was then down!
What the hmrc probably fail to realise is that with the online software as it is - it's often not even possible to generate the vat return to look at what the figures will be or see what may need amending when their systems go down. To gloss over this as a minor failure when a busoness can't carry on their necessary behind the scenes calculations is simply not acceptable. Have hmrc given this issue any though - probably not by their semi dismissal of the problem. If they want to quote actual true stats can they let us know what the most popular day for filing vat returns is - i think you will almost certainly find that the answer is the 7th of the month!
There is truth and hrmc highly paid anonymous spin that is worse than what a politician can chuck out at times.
The representative additionally said that individuals could have until tomorrow (9 Jan) to record their Sept-Nov VAT returns without causing late documenting punishments - another expansion to the first 24hr unwinding.
https://www.mybkexperience.xyz/
This also happened on the last day for filing for the September quarter returns (more than 500 businesses couldn't file) and I also think that there were issues for the October period returns as well. For the September quarter there was also an issue for the Barclays payment service and with Xero. It doesn't bode well for the December quarter ends with the increased number of taxpayers filing due to the deferred group and also the increased number of payments being handled by Barclays for self-assessment and VAT at the end of January!
I also have clients that have not been able to access the file because of issues with the links between the Business Tax Account and the Agent Services Account and problems signing up. I have one client that will probably have to be manually filed by HMRC for the third quarter in a row because of sign up issues.
Before HMRC progresses to the digital links enforcement on taxpayers, it needs to get its own house in order and ensure that there is some certainty about filing VAT returns.
I have not been able to submit ANY VAT Returns from my Sage Accounts since MTD started in April 2019. Sage says its an HMRC problem, HMRC say its a Sage problem. I have to send the Sage backups to an associate who submits them from their PC. Sometimes they have to use the bridging software to get the Returns to submit, but there is no pattern to identify. There is obviously something wrong in my settings, but no-one can tell me what. I never had a problem submitting VAT Returns using the old system. Every time I try to submit and fail, I send the HMRC a screenshot of the page and they say they will be in touch. They never phone, but just send an email quoting a reference, but they don't say which company's VAT Return the response applies to, so worthless. When will we ever get competent people working at HMRC who can help us to fulfil our legal obligations?
They have experienced an "elevated level" of API errors. Does that mean that there is a normal level of API errors that they are happy with?
Xero's VAT process under MTD is truly awful. Fine to have a live link to HMRC when filing a return, but should be easy enough for anybody to view a VAT report showing what that report would show without a live link. It's just a report!!! I don't believe HMRC have stipulated this. If they have then it's making it more likely errors will occur when they say MTD has been introduced to reduce errors. Anybody wishing to add there comments or just vote for this as something for Xero to correct should go to this Xero discussion thread: https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/102050933/ and vote for a change.
I've just tried to file 2 December returns today through Sage with no luck.
I realise that HMRC's systems are notoriously shocking in January but the past three days have been awash with online services being unavailable or APIs being unavailable across the taxes.
And they want more 'customers' to interact electronically with them for more purposes. That's clearly going to end well.
I cannot file a VAT return currently (not the end of the world as its deadline is 7/02)
However, I also need to register someone for VAT this afternoon and cannot seem to get into my account currently - is it not working again?
I can get in to online services currently, it is just the API that is not working. It is up and down like a yo-yo though so we're just having to keep trying periodically.
Thanks.
I finally managed to file the return, and it says fulfilled BUT I wasnt asked for the usual authorisation code. So thats odd. Ill see if I can see the filing in my ASA tomorrow.
It was also working when the VAT registration client came in, so that was OK too.
Ive filed a few SA returns today too. Slow, but filed OK.
And while waiting I completed the survey!
I use Quickfile accounting software and MTD filing works perfectly.
Is it a Zero/Sage problem?
Perhaps the live link is Xero thinking ahead so that when all transaction data goes to HMRC in real time they are ready for it.
I am glad I have not yet signed my clients up for MTD! What a load of rubbish it is.Seems like Sage xero and quickbooks cannot handle it. I have not got the time to spend trying to file VAT returns through a failed system. Hopefully the Government will scrap it in the next budget. I wonder sometimes whether there were back handers from HMRC to the software companies to promote this garbage!