Email glitch forces taxman to ditch late-filing penalties

The Inland Revenue has waived the £100 late-filing charge for taxpayers who were unable to amend their online self-assessment tax returns before the 31 January deadline due to a technical glitch with the Revenue's automated email response system.

Returns submitted online are supposed to receive an almost immediate automated email response telling the taxpayer whether the return has been accepted or whether it has failed and needs resubmitting.

But problems with the system meant the messages backed up and although all were sent out before the deadline, it left many people with no time to resubmit the return if their original submission had failed.

The Inland Revenue apologised and said the late-filing penalty for those people will be waived and they will have 14 days from the date the "submission failed" message was finally sent out to them.

A statement on its website said: "We apologise for the disruption to the service and can assure you that no details have been lost and there is no need to resubmit successful returns."

silicon.com was inundated by emails from frustrated readers trying to submit their self-assessment tax returns online as the Inland Revenue site creaked and slowed down under the volume of users.

But an Inland Revenue spokesman said this will not be accepted as an excuse for filing returns late.

"Our system was working and it never crashed at any point although it was slightly slower," he said.

No figures are available yet on how many people filed online this year but the Revenue said the website was dealing with 5,000 tax returns an hour at its peak over the weekend. Almost 800,000 people filed online last year.

Plus: Read our leader article on this year's online tax returns fiasco.