So...

Hits to the treasury peaked in the last month of the financial year, then decreased until a financial crisis occurred? this is news how exactly?

Direct Gov ?

And is this due to them moving all their services to Direct Gov which is what they are supposed to do under the Governments convergence strategy (which could, shock, be working) ?

So don't read it

If you're not interested don't read it. For example the entire Daily Star newspaper barely classes as news therefore I don't read it.

Hits?

Any foo kno that 'hits' are nigh-on meaningless. Aren't these people meant to be professionals? Can't they talk in 'individual visitors' or something else useful?

For all we know, the Financial Inclusion Taskforce website might have one page with 352 CSS/JS/image objects (not unheard of) and was visited once, by one person.

ERDoS?

And how many of these sites died in the usual El Reg Denial of Service attack?

I'm sure the FIT site probably doubled it's yearly stats in an hour.

Hits

Yes but most people mean page impressions when they say hits and those terms are now used interchangably (albeit wrongly) its the media that cling to this term (and those that sell ad space)

Skew the results

It's tempting to visit some of these obscure sites and do a Ctrl-F5 repeatedly for a few minutes. They'll get mighty confused thinking they got all popular all of a sudden. And knowing how much they probably know about IT, they won't recognise that all the hits are from a single IP! :-)

Reason for traffic upshot in October

There was adjustment of personal allowances to account for the earlier removal of the 10% band.

The financial crisis probably didn't send anybody rushing to HMRC. This repository of tax data wouldn't be much help while share prices and banks were collapsing.

Thought you'd like to know.

And another thing...

Those completing self-assessment forms had to get them in early (during October) rather than by 31 January. That too would have had a significant effect - wouldn't you concur?