HMRC Systems Upgrade

HMRC has announced that its semi-annual software upgrade will take place over the weekend of 5-6 April.

The core element of the work will be completed between Friday evening and Sunday morning, but some tasks will continue into Monday morning.

HMRC played down the significance of the “routine” seasonal upgrade and told AccountingWEB that it would not herald the launch of any new digital services. This stance is at odds with the department’s Digital Strategy, which set out an ambitious timetable for a range of online services, including a client tax dashboard for agents (known as online self service), digital self assessment and expanded facilities for what used to be known as the business tax dashboard and is now referred to as “Your tax account”.

A number of AccountingWEB members reported on Wednesday that they couldn’t access HMRC online services via their usual links and were being redirected to Gov.uk instead.

HMRC said the temporary redirections from HMRC.gov.uk were put in place as part of preparatory work to more migrate HMRC website content to Gov.uk.

“Unfortunately visitors to the HMRC website were automatically redirected to Gov.uk for a short period earlier today. This problem has now been resolved and we apologise to any customers who were inconvenienced over this short period.”

That may be the official line, but if the back-room upgrade connects to interfaces that link to HMRC.gov.uk and will ultimately migrate to the new Gov.uk site, then they are inextricably linked.

The last reported deadline for the web project was March this year, but the migration of hundreds of pages of content as well as agent, self assessment, PAYE and VAT online services hasn’t happened yet.

Tax does have to be taxing.

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