Treble trouble

I would like to offer my sincere apologies to tax agents who encountered difficulties using Self Assessment Online on 31 January and 1 February.

SA Online had as you say in your issue of 7 February been functioning well and we were very disappointed with the poor service that some filers using the HMRC software experienced in the run up to the SA deadline.

We had rigorously capacity tested for the volumes we expected (which exceeded the volumes we actually saw).

I can also confirm that the problems did not affect commercial software products used mainly by agents.

Of course whilst we will do our utmost to avoid it we can never completely rule out a problem with our IT around deadline dates.

So what really matters is how HMRC handles such circumstances and we tried hard to do that well this year. On 31...