Sally is a volunteer treasurer for a small local charity, and is trying to report the year-end information to HMRC for tax purposes (they employ a few people). There is a £75 incentive to submit online this year and that would be extremely useful for a small charity.
There are two ways of doing this – one with offline preparation, followed by submission and the other fully online. Sally had the Employers CD-ROM and so started by trying to install the application onto her computer. The installation failed part way through for some unexplained reason (after investigation, it may be related to anti-virus software interference). The problem was compounded by the fact that the partly-installed application could not be uninstalled .. .as clearly the un-installation component is the last piece to be installed – only after everything else has been successfully installed. This is not a fail-safe design!
Sally tried repeatedly to contact the help desk over 3 days before she finally got through on the phone. Okay, it’s a busy time of year but that shouldn’t be a surprise, and the additional workload of lots of people wanting to file online should also have been anticipated. The answer she got was that her computer was too old for the CD-ROM (it is 4 years old and more than meets the minimum requirements) and she should register for the fully online service instead!
This she did, or at least tried. But the process seems unnecessarily complex and it failed part-way through. Not once, but three times – leaving her with 3 partially created accounts on the Govt. Gateway … and no nearer to filing the year-end tax return. She will also now get three activation codes in the post – adding to the costs for HMRC and only reminding her of her frustration. She sought help from the local Tax office who confirmed that she was putting in the correct information, but could not understand why the registration process was failing.
Sally had heard the in-queue announcements on the help desk phone system a number of times – one part invited callers to submit an email query as an alternative channel. The actual e-mail address was hard to decipher from the announcement, but Sally is nothing if not persistent and she tracked it down on the website. Imagine her delight and expectation when she actually got a reasonably prompt reply. But her hopes were soon dashed when she read the content…
“ … For security reason we cannot verify USER ID’s via email. Please contact
the helpdesk below who will try and help you further….”
… she is now filling out the forms by hand and will put them in the post!
