*tears hair out in frustration*

[baratron]

Further to my posts about my tax return last week, I spent two evenings getting together everything that I could. Worked out how much I earned last tax year and how much I'd paid in commission and other "allowable" expenses. But then I couldn't finish the tax return because the contents of our bedroom are still piled up in the spare room from the DIY floor project, and the boxes of paperwork I needed to get to were on the other side of some large, heavy furniture items that I couldn't move on my own.

So we moved them last night, and I finished the tax return this evening. It took me about 2 hours to find precisely 4 pieces of paper: the end-of-tax-year financial statements for my National Savings account, my Natwest current account, my Natwest savings account and my BT share dividend. The total amount of interest I've received from those four accounts combined is less than £50. 2 hours of looking for £50 worth of information - gah! All my financial paperwork should, theoretically, be safely in a single filing box; but in practice, this last year's been awful for me with health stuff so I'm very disorganised. Getting that sorted is on my list of Things To Do when the upstairs floor is completely finished.

Once I had all the figures together, it did only take me half an hour to fill the form in. But it's not made easier by cryptic error messages like this one:
You have not entered a date in boxes 3.4 and/or 3.74. You must enter a date in both these boxes unless you have indicated in box 3.9 that special arrangements apply, or in box 3.10 that accounts details are on last year's return, or in box 3.93 that provisional figures are used. Please select the 'Sitemap' link to navigate to the relevant box numbers and amend your entry.

It's like I know what all those words mean individually, but put the whole lot together and I have no clue what's going on. Gah.

Also, bizarrely and worryingly, the National Insurance number on my tax return was not only incorrect, it wasn't even a valid NI number! They have the format two letters, 6 numbers, one letter (e.g. XY 12 34 56 A) and the number on my tax return was something like 11B56789. Erm...?

Now, my connection to the Inland Revenue site is sitting here with a window entitled ServletExec Failure and contents "Failed to open socket.", so I'm guessing it's not working JUST to piss me off.

I am, btw, very impressed that the tax return has the words "civil partner" all over the place: every time the word "spouse" is mentioned, it says "or civil partner" and every time "marriage" is mentioned it says "or civil partnership". Shame we couldn't go all the way and have a single entity for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples, but at least they are regarded as basically the same thing in law.

Comments

[barakta]

Argh. I don't think I could cope with stupid error messages like that, there's NO need for it. I hate things which constantly barf on electronic forms, and you can't identify EXACTLY what it is, and it turns out to be something invisible - cos there's ALWAYS something else which needs redoing each time as the 'reload/submit' bit always screws something up.

Well done for completing it for another year, grr@pre-paying £880 to the wretched revenue people who get the interest on it too. What's the point of pre-paying tax? Cos if you don't get taxed as much you then have to claim it back - of course I'm sure they like this as they get free unclaimed money.

I hope the site starts to accept submissions too - yet another crap feature of online forms.

[mistdog.livejournal.com]

I had an odd NI number like that too. I phoned up my local tax office to sort it out, and apparently it doesn't matter, it's a "temporary NI number" which gets replaced by the real one you put into the appropriate box in the form. They didn't know why it was there.

I was pleased about the availability of civil partnership as an option everywhere too, since that is indeed my status. I agree it should be the same thing for all couples, but at least the only difference now is the name.

I guess the socket failure thing is going to be a load-related problem with it being the last few hours to submit. I didn't get anything like that when I filed a couple of weeks ago.

[mjl]

The number in the wrong format is a temporary reference from the tax office, which isn't actually recognised for National Insurance purposes. In theory if you return something with that reference, they should be able to match it up to whatever else they have tied to that temporary number. Why they wouldn't have your actual NI number for your tax return I have no idea. Don't think it's anything to worry about - if you put your actual NI number in the submission, it should get matched up with the rest of your stuff (in fact, they seem to be fairly good at matching people's details up based on names, addresses and dates of birth - I think between their own disparate systems and the dodgy information submitted by individuals and employers, they have to do that a lot of the time anyway...)

Anyway, yay for submission of tax return.