Cobweb clean-up

KEY POINTS

• HMRC’s meta-tagging problems.
• Disappearing documents.
• Simplifying to extremes.
• Potential helpfulness of dating web material.
• Time to hand over.

The cobweb campaign has a clear, uncompromising mission: to boldly go where no one has cleaned before: the dark and dusty corners of HMRC’s website. It is a year since the campaign was launched.

In that time, Taxation readers have sent me several hundred emails, identifying perplexing pathways, lost links and buried treasures. Your contributions formed the basis of my writing.

But this article is different: it focuses on HMRC’s reaction to the campaign.

HMRC respond

At first, HMRC’s response was unpredictable. Sometimes the relevant part of the website was updated within hours of publication. Other problems took longer to solve, and were only reformed after being criticised in several articles.

It was rewarding to see parts of the site tidied up: links mended, guidance updated, and inconsistencies ironed out. Essentially, though, these were sticking-plaster solutions for individual web pages. The campaign had a broader ambition: systemic reform.

The first sign of a structural response came from HMRC’s pensions team, who made direct contact early last year.

Several meetings and many emails later, I can testify to the team’s willingness to improve the pensions part of the website, and its commitment to making it accurate and accessible.

Other contacts followed. HMRC’s capital allowances team emailed to tell me it had updated the manual for the Finance Act 2008 changes; the employment group responded immediately when informed about a faulty link on the What’s New page.

Finally, I was invited to submit all cobwebs received, both published and unpublished, to the HMRC web team. These are the people who put material on the site, move it around, and take it down. They are essentially publishers, not authors or editors.

Structural reform

The web team not only sorted out readers’ specific cobwebs, but also explained the root cause of the most common problems: why the search engine finds it so difficult to prioritise data, causing spurious or out-of-date documents to appear at the top of the list, and why highly relevant material is hidden under a cloak of invisibility, to be discovered only by chance.

The team told me that HMRC have a major issue with ‘meta-tagging’: jargon for giving data the right labels, so the search engine can find it. The team is trying to crack the problem.

Its librarian recently provided guidance to authors and editors of web material, setting out best practice when creating meta data and explaining how it helps the search engine to work efficiently.

The web team has also embarked on the mammoth task of checking and improving tags on more than 125,000 pages of existing specialist material.

Other reforms are also under way. Although the web team does not normally write text, it has revised over 1,000 pages of less technical material, with the aim of making it more accessible to the general public.

Particularly dusty parts of the site – those not been updated for at least 18 months – have been prioritised for ‘content review audits.’

Cobweb capture mechanisms

HMRC have also introduced two cobweb reporting mechanisms. The first is a general feedback form.

Its questions include:

• How easy was it to find what you were looking for?
• How helpful did you find the search facility generally?
• Was the information you found useful?
• Was the information accurate and up to date?
• How helpful was the ‘Find a form’ section of the site’?
• How satisfied are you with the website overall?

The form provides plenty of space for further comment on problems you encounter – or praise you would like to provide.

The second is a specific ‘broken link’ reporting facility, which is particularly welcome. You can tell HMRC which page you were trying to reach, and from where.

Clicking on a broken link normally leads to a cul-de-sac headed ‘sorry, but the page you are trying to reach cannot be found’. The revised text now adds the following rider: ‘If you’ve linked to this page from another page in our site please forward the details’ and provides a hyperlink to report the breakage.

Ideally, this hyperlink would take you directly to the broken links reporting page. To my slight disappointment, you are instead directed to a screen headed ‘feedback’.

To find the broken links connection you need to scroll down the page to the end. This is, however, but a small blemish on a valuable reform.

The proof of the pudding

It thus appears that the cobweb campaign has been in-sourced by HMRC, which is great news. But is it working?

First signs are good. Vicki Hearsey e-mailed in mid-March to say that the ‘self assessment for non-residents page had a broken link to the self-assessment helpline’. This was certainly true. I checked when I got her e-mail, but by the time I drafted this article the link was working again.

The car benefits calculator has also improved. Towards the end of 2009, a reader complained that its figures were still ‘provisional pending the 2009 Budget’ which had taken place more than six months previously.

When I checked the calculator for this article, the same page had been ‘updated in January 2010 to allow calculations for the years 2004/05 to 2010/11 inclusive’.

It then, quite reasonably given that there may be two Budgets this year, went on to say:

‘The 2010/11 results include measures announced at pre-Budget report 2009 but are provisional until they become law and until it is clear that there will be no further changes affecting 2010/11 in a 2010 Budget.’

Over-tidying?

It may seem churlish for the cobweb campaign to complain about over-tidying, but the clean-up process does appear to have discarded some useful material. Consider the pages on Revenue and Customs Briefs: part of the website which has been roundly criticised in two consecutive cobweb articles.

Recent Briefs used to be summarised on the main page, with older ones grouped by topics listed on a side-bar. Clicking on the topics, such as ‘trusts’ or ‘VAT’, opened a sub-folder which was supposed to contain all the Briefs relevant to that subject, but documents often slipped between the cracks and disappeared.

Richard Fleet suggested that Briefs be stored by number as well as by topic, and I endorsed his idea.

HMRC have now included these missing Briefs in the relevant topic folders. They have also introduced a new procedure so that when a Brief is published out of numerical order, a notice tells you it is not ‘missing’ but merely somewhere in the publication queue.

The main page has also been reorganised, and takes account of our request for a numerical as well as a topical listing. It now looks like this:

• Briefs published within the last few weeks
• Briefs issued since 2009 organised by subject
• Briefs issued in 2010
• Briefs issued in 2009
• Tax Bulletins issued before 2007

Sadly, in the spring clean, Briefs published in 2007 and 2008 appear to have been lost, mislaid, or dumped: this is a plea for their return. Even though the material may not be current, it is still valuable.

Disputes with HMRC usually involve previous year’s tax returns, and it is helpful to be able locate the guidance which was extant at the time the transaction occurred.

Black hole?

Another disappearance was noted by Rebecca Cave. On 23 July 2009, at page 85, a link was published in Taxation. It allowed the downloading of a pro-forma payment slip. Clicking on this transfers you to a broken link providing only the familiar message: ‘Sorry but the page you are trying to reach cannot be found.’

So where is the downloadable payment slip? The HMRC search engine cannot locate it; neither can Google. It would be mischievous to suggest its disappearance had anything to do with HMRC’s comment, published with the July Taxation weblink, pointing out that ‘the department… prefers electronic payment and recommends direct debit online’.

Over-simplifying

Peter Roberts struggled to find guidance on the new time limits for overpayment claims (R40s). The technical position is as follows:

• with effect from April 2010, most time limits are cut from six to four years;
• this does not apply where the taxpayer is outside self assessment. Instead, the four year deadline is delayed by a further two years (SI 2009/403, article 10, para 3);
• as a result, 2005/06 R40 claims for the tax year for non-self assessment taxpayers can be submitted up to 5 April 2012.

When Peter emailed me, he had managed to locate this guidance on hmrc.gov.uk/pensioners/taxback/htm, although he said that this process ‘did take some time… all my initial searches using terms such as “error/mistake claims”, “repayment claims”, “R40 claims”, etc. brought up lots of unwanted links’.

The good news is that the meta-data now appears to have been corrected: a search for ‘R40 time limits’ gives only a single hit, which leads to the clear and well-written webpage headed ‘Correcting your tax return and claiming any refund’.

There are, however, two problems. The first is demonstrated by the dates listed under the heading ‘Getting a refund’:

Why is there no mention of the longer deadline for non-self assessment taxpayers? The answer is at the top of the page, which reads:

‘You are here: Home > Self Assessment > Your tax bill, payments, deadlines, corrections and refunds > Correcting your tax return and claiming any refund.’

In other words, this particular screen sits within the ‘self assessment’ part of the site.

But only very alert users will spot this, and even if they do, how will they know that different, more generous rules apply to those outside self assessment, especially as the search engine provides only a single, hyperlinked page?

Second, the link Peter found, which did provide information about the more generous limits, has been disconnected, so it too only says: ‘Sorry but the page you are trying to reach cannot be found.’

This is unfortunate, not only because information for non-self assessment taxpayers appears to have been withdrawn altogether, but also because this particular web reference was widely circulated: sources as varied as TaxAid’s Winter 2009 Bulletin and the Yorkshire Evening Post provide it as the place to look for repayment information.

It is to be hoped that someone will soon register this broken link via HMRC’s new reporting facility. But the wider problem, i.e. the narrowness of the current guidance, remains unresolved.

Undated

Readers frequently recommend the use of dates on web pages, as this would provide clues to their currency. So if, for example, a document pre-dated a Finance Act, a ministerial announcement or a Supreme Court decision, the informed reader might realise the information was no longer up to date.

I have mentioned this problem before in earlier articles. But Roger Jones points to ‘an ever-increasing number’ of documents which are not only undated, but unattributed: recent examples include the Q&A on the pension anti-forestalling rules, which he has seen appended to at least one commercial provider’s bulletin, with no indication that it was written by HMRC.

Then there is the oxymoronic ‘Simple guide to residence, ordinary residence and domicile’.

As Roger rightly says:

‘If I print them out, will I remember where they came from? Will I know when the comments were made? It would be so easy to put an HMRC logo and date on them.’

What’s (not quite so) new

Chris Jarman would also have been helped by dates on information. He was interested in the ‘What’s new’ page for 27 January, which promised ‘New guidance on the treatment of foreign currency bank accounts, including the extension of HMRC Statement of Practice 10/84 and a de minimis for foreign exchange calculations.’ The link led to this.

If you scroll down this page, you see what you expected: a heading offering: ‘New guidance on foreign currency bank accounts and the remittance basis’, and links to here.

Click on this, and you find it contains a paragraph promisingly entitled ‘Extension of Statement of Practice (SP) 10/84’. However, there is something clearly awry here: the text reads (my italics)

‘SP 10/84… It has been suggested that this non-statutory practice should be extended to include overseas bank accounts held by individuals who are not domiciled in the UK. Our initial analysis has shown that such a change would be outside HMRC’s administrative discretion, and would therefore require primary legislation. We are continuing to explore this proposal for future years.’

So this cannot be the ‘extension of HMRC Statement of Practice 10/84 and a de minimis for foreign exchange calculations’ promised by What’s new. So where is it?

At this point Chris retraced his steps. At the first hyperlinked page, he bypassed the deceptive ‘New guidance on foreign currency bank accounts’ and found, at the very bottom, a link entitled: ‘Extension of Statement of Practice (SP) 10/84 to non-domiciled individuals’.

Contrary to the assertion quoted above (which still forms part of current guidance) under HMRC’s administrative discretion, SP10/84 is now being applied to non-domiciled individuals’ overseas foreign currency accounts, and under the same powers, a £500 de minimis limit has been implemented.

As Chris says, the lessons are twofold: first, outdated statements need to be removed; and second, it would be much easier for users to ascertain which conflicting statement was more up to date if each page contained a ‘date last updated’.

Still in force?

A similar issue faced Rebecca Cave, when looking for guidance on the capital gains tax treatment of trademarks falling outside the corporate intellectual property (IP) regime. She knew the relevant page used to be CG68661, but the index to the section on goodwill and IP runs only from 68000 to 68330, and thus does not include 68661.

She next used the ‘search this manual’ facility, also without success. Finally, she searched the whole of the HMRC site, and her e-mail says: ‘Hey presto: CG68661 appears, as do the subsequent pages’.

While delighted to track down the document, its concealment worried her. She asked: ‘What is the status of that guidance: is it current or has it been withdrawn?’

A date would have provided her with a clue, but it would be better still if obsolete guidance was marked as such. To be fair, there are some parts of the site which do follow this principle, which not only lists out-of-date leaflets, but explains why they are no longer current. This model should be more widely adopted.

Handing over the Hoover

Some correspondents have suggested that the campaign should cover other areas of HMRC’s work, such as online call centres. One reader spent so long trying to reach the centre for non-residents by phone that she wondered if it, too, had gone non-resident.

I am, however, inclined to draw a line at this point. HMRC are cleaning their site, in an organised, structured way, and they have in-sourced cobweb reporting. It is time to step back, and let them get on with the job.

So I hereby suspend the cobweb campaign. When you find cobwebs in future, report them to HMRC.

But if nothing happens, or the response time is ridiculously slow, send an me email, as before. The campaign can always be resurrected, although I do hope this will not prove to be necessary.

A tidier, more user-friendly site also benefits HMRC: the more people use and trust the site, the more effectively it can disseminate information.

A recent example is the new facility encouraging employers to register for email prompts. Those registering will be reminded about new Employer Bulletins and post-Budget changes.

There is no equivocation: the page states openly that the facility will allow HMRC ‘to reduce the amount of employer information it posts out and replace it with online guidance and downloads’.

The cobweb campaign thus comes to a close, and it is time for bouquets.

Firstly, my thanks to those readers who took the trouble to write: nothing would have happened without your e-mails.

Thanks are due too, to Taxation’s editors, as the magazine provided essential publicity for the campaign.

And finally, I am grateful to HMRC, who responded to criticism, and initiated change.

I have to spend the next few weeks recovering from a hip operation. The hospital has given me a list of items which aid convalescence, but one has been deleted: I no longer require a long-handled feather duster.

Anne Redston is a barrister and visiting professor in law at King’s College, London; she sits on the technical committee of the ICAEW’s Tax Faculty. The views expressed are her own.

Issue: 4250 / Categories: Comment & Analysis , cobweb campaign , Admin