TaxSource Total

Here you can access summary of the key current tax developments in Ireland, the UK and internationally as reported by Chartered Accountants Ireland

The report of key tax developments are displayed per year, per month, by Ireland, the UK or International and by report title

HMRC apologises for penalty notices sent to wrong agents

HMRC has contacted us with information and an apology as a result of 2019/20 late filing penalty notices for taxpayers being sent to the wrong agents in some cases. The advice from HMRC is that any wrongly received notices should be securely destroyed via confidential waste or returned to the address set out later.

The full response from HMRC is as follows:-

“Dear Agents,

We sincerely apologise for the recent security breach and recognise that this is not in line with our Charter standards. We take all aspects of protecting data very seriously so there has been a lot of activity to understand this incident and mitigate future risks. We have received the following report on what happened and what action has been taken as a result:

Background & Recap

We became aware of an issue with SA326D Penalty Notices on 23rd March. We identified that this was down to a software problem with the underlying cause of this issue linked to testing. The issue is limited only to SA326Ds bulk run.

What do we understand now about impacts?

We know that the majority of agents received the correct information and following extraction of data from the affected files we believe the total affected number to be just above 32k.

  • the total number of taxpayers impacted is 32,075;
  • 18,496 UTRs/taxpayers notices went to the wrong agent;
  • 13,579 UTRs/Taxpayers went to the correct agent;
  • 15,459 agents received incorrect envelopes (getting a wrong letter or they don’t know that their letter went to another agent);
  • two taxpayers have received a copy that contains 5 Agent copies in total for other taxpayers.

We re-issued the copy notices to agents.

Communications

  • We have issued guidance to Personal Tax Operations and Agent Helpline colleagues
  • We have posted updates to Agent Forum and informed Accounting Web

Security

We have been assured following the data interrogation carried out by IT colleagues that the total number of incorrect notices sent to Agents is just over 18k.

We are holding an after-action review to understand what went wrong and how we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

We understand that HMRC has reissued the relevant penalty notices to the correct agents. This issue has also been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The advice from HMRC is that any wrongly received notices should be securely destroyed via confidential waste or returned to:

SA326D

Central Mail Unit

S1250

Benton Park View

Longbenton

Newcastle

NE98 1ZZ