HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has been experiencing a number of IT difficulties in recent days, as customers rush to file their tax returns before the 31 January deadline.<\/p>\n
According to reports, several HMRC IT systems either crashed or went down completely on Saturday 6 January, affecting hundreds of taxpayers who had specifically set the weekend aside to file their returns.<\/p>\n
A report in Computer Weekly<\/em> suggests that several of the department\u2019s most popular online services were affected by the issues, including self-assessment, VAT and PAYE.<\/p>\n HMRC\u2019s self-assessment service also experienced issues a few days previous, with the service temporarily down on Thursday 4 January, too.<\/p>\n The tax authority received an influx complaints via social media, with many users struggling to perform actions via their personal digital tax accounts \u2013 and many more being locked-out of HMRC\u2019s website altogether.<\/p>\n Since the weekend, the Revenue\u2019s services are now back online.<\/p>\n An HMRC spokesperson said: \u201cOur IT experts worked very hard to get services back to normal as quickly as possible, and services resumed later that day.\u201d<\/p>\n The frustrating issues experienced by many users at one of the busiest times of the year for HMRC highlight the importance of forward-planning, and of avoiding peak times such as weekends when digitally submitting a tax return. It is also always wise to seek the assistance of a specialist accountant where appropriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has been experiencing a number of IT difficulties in recent days, as customers rush to file their tax returns before the 31 January deadline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2220"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2221,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2220\/revisions\/2221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}