Thursday 25 July 2013

RTI - Everything Is Wunderbar!



A few days ago HMRC published a report "The Real Time Information Pilot" that summarises the findings from HMRC's Real Time Information (RTI) pilot.

The conclusion is self congratulatory:
"It is clear that the success of the national roll out of reporting PAYE in real time so far is based on the solid foundations laid by the success of expanding the RTI pilot into live running."
This despite the fact that there are a number of issues that may not yet be fully addressed, eg:
  • Duplicate employments
  • Employer Payment Summary (EPS) - the issue is ongoing as there is a risk that, when automatic late payment penalties are implemented from April 2014, HMRC’s systems will create penalisable payment defaults in the absence of an EPS reporting adjustments to the employer’s liability. HMRC are monitoring how to support the employer community further to ensure EPS are filed promptly where necessary.
  • Out of Sync Payments etc
Those issues aside, I could not help but chuckle to myself when reading the Strategic Lessons Learned which included the earth shattering observations that:

• A pilot is an excellent way of introducing large scale change
• Thorough consultation is indispensable.

Have these people never run IT implementations/systems upgrades before?

Tax does have to be taxing.

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4 comments:

  1. In fairness to HMRC, everyone was expecting RTI to be an unmitigated disaster and in fact it has been at best "Okay". Certainly it suffered from scope-creep and significant budget over-runs and the back-end is not as functional as expected, especially given the overspend.

    About the only thing they did hit was the date.

    Roughly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The system so far has coped with processing the volumes of data submitted by businesses but as the 16000 biggest employers do not join RTI until October the system is far from being under full load. Whether what HMRC are doing with the data once they have received it can be considered a success is entirely another matter

      “Delay extending RTI”, says HMRC user group adviser

      Delete
  2. "Have these people never run IT implementations/systems upgrades before?"

    I assume this is a rhetorical question Ken, I'd have thought both you and your readers have an excellent track record in cocking up large, expensive IT projects!

    ReplyDelete
  3. It is has been such a success that Mark Hall who was the current temporary acting HMRC CIO after Pavitt quit has not been selected to do the job permanently.

    ReplyDelete