HMRC Gateway is currently busy
Perhaps this isn’t the best place to vent on the topic, but I am sure it will ring true with anyone that runs a business and perhaps might help you make a more information decision about your business IT. I have attempted (in vein) to submit my end of year Pay As You Earn (PAYE) returns today for the third time, using HMRC’s Basic PAYE Tool 2012, but keep running into an error as their gateway is busy …
This isn’t anything new – let’s face it – ever since HMRC went on-line they have had their fair share of teething problems, but surely with the introduction of Real Time Information (RTI) kicking in this year they should have made sure that their servers were up to the job!
From 6th April 2013 business have to submit PAYE information at the time a payment is made to an employee and one has to remember that the majority of businesses will do this at the beginning / end of each week / month and be required to submit the information to HMRC at the same time. You also have to remember the punitive penalties HMRC can now apply for late / incorrect submissions, but how can they possibly enforce this if the cannot keep their own house in order?
I would imagine the budget for HMRC IT services is colossal – gargantuan even – and that they could purchase enough racks and links into their data centres to provide a service that is fit for purpose. In the past there have been problems at certain key time like the 31st January (deadline for end of year returns / payments on account for self assessment) and 19th May (deadline for end of year PAYE returns) so I have always avoided these by getting submission done early and in the main this has worked, but this year it seems worse than usual!
Now I know the government don’t have a brilliant track record when it comes to IT (passport office fiasco, to name but one), but they need to sort this out. It is a waste of employers time, when we could be doing something more important like generating income to stimulate the economy and in the same process acting as unpaid tax collectors (VAT celebrating it’s 40th birthday this year)!
So how do you avoid the same sort of issues – all be it on a lesser scale – within your business. When we are developing systems, we always try and replicate real life as closely as possible. One factor developers should always consider is the size of data set they use during development; it’s all very well getting the system to work with say a hundred records, but how will it perform when you have one hundred thousand records? It isn’t much good waiting for the system to crash, you need to anticipate the amount of data that the system will process, so that you can stress test it.
Other elements a business needs to think about is the environment their system will be situated in, e.g. a remote data centre, internal server, etc. and you need to think about connectivity, reliability … the list goes on. How often has your website not been accessible or your broadband connectivity been down?
To avoid the common pitfalls you need to consider the worst possible scenario and then put control measures in place to reduce the risk a.k.a. disaster recovery / business continuity. For larger organisations, this isn’t such a big issue as they have the resources at hand, but for small businesses this can present a significant issue. Having said that, accessing the situation and planning for the various scenarios is always beneficial. A good example of a control measure is for example, avoiding key deadlines (as I described above) that in reality helps a system cope with critical periods.
Resources: -
Get ready to operate PAYE in Real Time
Switching to Basic PAYE Tools (RTI)
HMRC attacked for customer service failures
Gov’t committee slams HMRC failures (again)