Revenue denies e-filing site crashed
The Inland Revenue is boasting that it got a planned software upgrade finished on its self-assessment website ahead of schedule contradicting reports that the site had crashed.
The Revenue said the site had been taken off-line on Thursday, as planned, and went back up agin on Friday, well ahead of its Sunday deadline.
However, the fact that it had to be taken down at all has raised criticism that the systems should have been tested and not implemented until everything was working to specifications.
Chas Roy Chowdhury, head of taxation at ACCA, said: ‘It would have better if they had got it right in the first place.’
He questioned whether the number of users of the site warranted taking it down.’The site has around 11,000 users out of a possible 4 million so for the Revenue to have to take the site off-line for such small usage is very strange.’
The Revenue hit back at reports that the site had crashed when in fact it had only gone through a long-planned upgrade.
A spokesman said: ‘It never crashed. We had planned to take the system down to upgrade the software.’
New software was added so that online tax returns did not have to be downloaded and then manually typed into taxpayers records. From now on the filings will appear automatically in records.
E-filing has gone through severe dealys. The site was due to go live in April but diffculties forced it to be put back until May and then a second time to July.
At that time Revenue officials said they could not rule out further delays.
Technical problems also extended the time it took to download forms from the site forcing the Revenue to send out thousands of CD Roms.
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