Posted on February 1st, 2009 by Tim Danton

Tax return system works, um, smoothly

After last year’s tax return debacle, which saw the Inland Revenue site collapse when 204,000 people attempted to enter their return on deadline day, it’s reassuring to see that this time it just worked.

Purely for the sake of research, and by no means due to me putting it off for a number of weeks for no particular reason, I found myself going through the various steps between 10.30 and 11.30 last night. And it worked without a hitch.

Perhaps part of the reason is because HMRC has greatly simplified the procedure – for instance, I wasn’t forced to enter all the details of The Guardian when declaring the magnificent £75 I earned for a piece on its website – but perhaps a bigger reason is because the team behind the system has done an excellent job in load testing and simulating.

It’s great to see a company, or in this case public service, learn the lessons from previous problems and rare that they get praise for doing so. Somehow, I doubt HMRC will get as much attention this year as they did last: people love to read, talk and write about failure, whereas success just doesn’t make a good headline.

Which rather reflects life as an IT professional as a whole. Make a mistake, everyone notices. Get something right, nobody seems to give a damn.

Tags: Government, Software, tax

Posted in: Random

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5 Responses to “ Tax return system works, um, smoothly ”

Greemble Says:
February 1st, 2009 at 10:39 pm
There is an old saying – “Good administration is invisible”

This saying works for IT industry as well as the office
Darien Graham-Smith Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:55 am
The service worked well for me too, but there was one aspect that had me tearing out what little remains of my hair. About half-way through the process I came to a page that asked me to enter my employer’s PAYE code, along with details of tax withheld from my salary for 2007-8.

Surely HMRC already knows these details? I mean, they must know that they’ve been receiving money on my account; and I very much hope they have a record of where it came from. Is there some reason why they can’t pipe this information from their own database into the self-assessment process? It seems to me that doing so would simplify the public burden and reduce the scope for mistakes.

But, alas, it seems that’s magic too deep for HMRC. As a result of which, my online tax return ended up taking rather longer to complete than it should have. Which is to say, about five minutes of typing and just over an hour driving into the office to pick up my damned P60.
MJ Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:03 am
Darien, you forget the audit role of the HMRC. If they ask you how much you got paid, and they ask the employer, they can check that they are the same. If different, then they can trigger an investigation…
Matt C Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Perhaps the reason the site didn’t fall down this year is because so many of us were unable to log in and therefore were less burden on the old HMRC 486. The password I used to request my user ID this year flat refused to work once I came to activate my id. Perhaps a mistake recording said password on my account? I think not, but either way a call to the helpdesk should sort that out in a jiffy. Four calls a day for the last ten working days and I still haven’t been able to get through, just a recorded message that tells me “it’s a busy time of the day, call back some other time” (paraphrased) and then dial tone.

Genius.
Buster Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:07 pm
My return was sent on the 3rd attempt. Impressed as last years it took over 30 clicks on the send button.
I started my return late April and gave up as the new layout kept freezing and logging me out. Glad this was fixed before the 31st Jan.