Online filing problem

We received reports earlier this week that parts of HMRC's online filing service was not working properly, with agents being unable to 'see' all of their client records. The system was found to be working again on Thursday (28 June 2007) morning and HMRC provided the following statement in response to our enquiry.

 'We are sorry that some of our agent customers experienced some problems with our IT systems yesterday. As part of the ongoing work being done to improve our online services, we made an enhancement to our systems on Tuesday night to upgrade communications between the HMRC portal and the Government Gateway. Delivery of the enhancement led to some agents experiencing problems with the client listing service. We identified the issue quickly yesterday morning, immediately let our customers know about the problem via our service availability pages on our website and set to work to resolve the problem.

'Customers did not see all the data about their clients that they were expecting to see when they accessed the service yesterday. HMRC can categorically assure customers affected in that way that there has been no loss of data and there is no risk to the security of the information.

'The fault that occurred is fully understood — it manifested itself by truncating the details visible, but now it has been corrected the full data set that customers need to see is available again.

'We worked extremely hard to resolve the issue throughout yesterday and also to keep the service users updated through the availability pages.

'We have now been able to resolve the problem and to restore client lists for agents. A full service is again available. We continue to learn lessons as we work to improve our online services for our customers and apologise again for the temporary problem yesterday.'

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