This year, a record-breaking 8.48 million returns were filed online, representing 84.5% of all returns received. This meant that, of the 10.74 million tax returns due for the tax year 2012 to 2013, 93.4% met the SA deadlines for paper and online filing.
On 31 January we saw a final rush to file, with 569,847 online returns coming in on time – the highest percentage ever recorded. It shows that many of you and SA taxpayers now prefer to use our digital service, over paper.
On Twitter, we saw references to the Faster Payment Service that Citibank provides for HMRC, where a few payments were sent back to the remitting bank on 31 January. This is normal practice during busy times and is within the industry standard. Citi told us:
The Citi Faster Payments infrastructure receives payments from the scheme individually, and processes and responds to the scheme within 15 seconds. From time to time, due to spikes in volume, there may be certain transactions that may get timed out. As a common practice, these transactions are re-submitted by the remitting bank. Given that this was a high volume day, Citi had proactively advised the scheme to instruct banks to resend any timed out transactions.
Towards the end of the afternoon, as the amount of traffic fell, this ceased to be an issue. The BillPay service that allows customers to pay using debit and credit cards also came under pressure in the evening, but just for a brief period. We’ll continue to work hard to make online filing experiences as straightforward and simple as possible.
As always, we welcome your feedback on the current process and any improvements you would like to see.
2 comments
Comment by SHIRLEY DANIEL posted on
WHY DO WE KEEP RECEIVING GENERIC NOTICES STATING NO FPS OR EPS RECD
20 TODAY FOR P/END 05.02.14 KNOW THAT WE HAVE SUBMITTED FPS AND EPS ON TIME
iS THIS AN ERROR AND HOW MANY EMPLOYERS HAVE THESE NOTICES BEEN ISSUED TO
Comment by carol posted on
Please do not make assumptions. The fact that a record number of returns have been made online does not mean our clients or general public prefer doing it- it simply means there are less choices for dealing with the returns in any other way.There are still many people for whom elecronic submissions are problematic.