As many people in the UK will be aware, today is 5th April – the end of the UK tax year. This means that people will be striving to top up their ISAs with this year’s allowances and complete any transactions they want counted for their 2009/10 tax year.

HMRC, the government department responsible for collection of taxes has decided that this is the perfect weekend to roll out an update to their systems. Logical I guess, given new tax rates will be coming in soon. In fact, they are carrying out maintenance which will mean the entire PAYE for employers online service will be down from Saturday to Monday morning. This includes tax code notices which tell us how much tax to deduct from employees under the pay-as-you-earn scheme. Of course, we can’t just wait until tomorrow, given it’s the end of the tax year.

The government wants us to access government services online, even mandating that most returns must be completed via the Internet, yet they appear to be unable to provide a service that is fit for purpose. If they are going to require us to do things online, it must be able to support those online services.

For example, we would have received these tax code notices in the post previously, so why can’t they send them to us by e-mail? Why do we have to login to a government website to access information which they could just as easily enclose in e-mail? The answer of course is that e-mail is insecure. I trust my server; does HMRC not trust theirs? We’ve had public-private infrastructure (PKI) encryption solutions for over a decade and it is perfectly possible to send content by e-mail securely.

I wonder what the political parties would say if we just turned the Internet off for ‘maintenance’ for the three days before the general election?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 2:44 pm and is filed under general.blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.