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HMRC issues CD-rom alert to employers

HM Revenue and Customs has warned employers who use its Employer CD-rom to update it immediately to avoid miscalculations. The department said it is important for employers to carry out the free update as it will ensure that they have the most recent guidance and calculators. "I encourage all employers who use our CD-rom to …

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pAnoNymous
FAIL

not surprised

let's just hope they're not calculating too many people's tax allowance using the old CD-ROMs. lol

no one thought to mention an intranet based app or managed autoupdate process when this system was being designed then?

johnB
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Intranet based app??

Intranet-based ? Que?

This is a CD-ROM sent out to employers by HMRC. Intranet isn't relevant.

And the system is donkeys years old (which presumably is why they are replacing it with a web-based app) - when it was invented, this new-fangled interweb thingy was just a geek's wet dream.

The "autoupdate" is a user spotting an error that's slipped by QA/QC & reporting it to HMRC. Who then have to decide if it's worth doing anything about.

More akin to an error in a published book.

Version 1.0
Happy

Register for our emails

I foresee a tsunami of spam arriving soon that appears to come from HMRC but roots a "new" update on the computers.

Anonymous Coward
Paris Hilton

And the link to this update is?

Might have been nice to have a link with this article which could at least take you to an HMRC page advising you why the update is necessary.

Paris because she is another example where a bit of linking might be useful.

John Tserkezis

Am I missing something?

Forgive me, but I'm a mere Australian, but boiled down, it's a story about a firm that is advising its users to upgrade to the latest version. Er, big deal?

The ONLY thing that would make this newsworthy is if the HMRC is noted for not updating software at all. Heck, even here in australia we get a bunch of accounting softwares that update with our Australian Taxation Office ruling changes every year, and manage to do that on time without fanfare.

I must be missing something.

ThomH
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HMRC is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (ie, the tax man)

So the subtext to the article is "aren't the public bodies inefficiently run?" and/or "aren't they wasting our taxpayer pounds by sticking to the technology of 1994?". You know, plus people tend to get angry about issues surrounding the efficiency of the collection of taxes generally...

Clyde

crap system

It's a horrible piece of unfriendly, cumbersome, slow, and non-intuitive piece of crap anyway.

Probably paid some politician's brown enevelopes ten times what many Reg readers could have done the job for.

It's not just a bonfire of quangos we need, it's a Jobcentre ticket for half the government employees.

AndyC
Thumb Up
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Actually, I find it very useful

Non-intuitive? Unfriendly? I think it is very useful, not only for calculating PAYE and NI contribs, but keeping a record of it for you easily. The last version (2009) was not good, but 2010's CDROM worked brilliantly. No problems filling in all of the records and it submitted everything for me with no problems at all.

Yes, it's written in Flash (I think) but it runs on Widoze, Mac and Linux. What other piece of tax software does that?

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"What other piece of tax software does that?"

The online self-assessment 'software'?

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