Taxation

HMRC Website Crashes

During yesterday (31 January 2008) morning and early afternoon, users trying to access the Self Assessment Online section of the HMRC website were confronted with the message ‘Online Service Temporarily Unavailable’.

Yesterday, lest we forget was the deadline for the submission of tax returns. Anyone who failed to submit their returns after the date faced a potential £100 fine.

Around 3.6 million people filed their returns online this year, up more than half a million on 2007. HMRC also said that around 104,000 people successfully completed their transaction on the site before the crash occurred.

Helpfully, HMRC was also kind enough to remind people about it, with large adverts with the message in very big, red letters: “31 Jan. A little reminder about your tax return.”

Given the site outage, that’s now had to be changed to: “1 Feb. A little reminder that we forget to chuck a few extra servers at our site.” Or something like that.

Actually, what it has said is that as long as you submit your returns by midnight on 1 February, they won’t fine you. Which is rather jolly considerate of them, all things considered.

Taxpayers contacting the HMRC helpline were told the problem was due to the high volume of people trying to access the service.

A huge swell of traffic on the very last day users could submit their forms. Now who could have possibly foreseen that?