SA Help

[XFool]

I would be grateful if somebody here can help with the following issue. I am trying, belatedly, to submit my tax return online to HMRC.

I have 'Foreign Income' from dividends from investment companies domiciled offshore. I enter the dividends for the first company, along with £0 for taxation taken off at source (because it is zero...) when I try to go to the next company via ADD, I just get the following warning:

There was a problem submitting the form

You must:

The amount entered for 'Foreign tax taken off or paid' must be greater than 0 (zero) or blank. Please amend.

The amount entered for 'Special Witholding Tax and any UK tax taken off' must be greater than 0 (zero) or blank. Please amend.

Both amounts WERE zero, so...

I remember having the same problem last year, but in that case I had left the relevant entries blank and, following a call to HMRC, was told I needed to enter zero as the software wouldn't accept blank. This year it won't even accept zero, so I'm stuck. (I suppose I could try £0.01)

Why does it have to be this difficult?

TIA

[PinkDalek]

You don’t seem to have tried blank this year.

[Alaric]

You don’t seem to have tried blank this year.

Tax software can be picky about whether the input is "null", a zero length string or " ", a one character string. They both look the same.

[PinkDalek]

You don’t seem to have tried blank this year.

Tax software can be picky about whether the input is "null", a zero length string or " ", a one character string. They both look the same.

And?

[chas49]

What happens if you enter the first company and then save the return and go to a different page, and then come back to add the second? Might be worth a try (but no warranties etc etc)

[XFool]

You don’t seem to have tried blank this year.

Believe it or not, just rereading that SA error text in my OP, the same thought just occurred to me! It's worth a try...

It doesn't inspire confidence, does it?

[XFool]

...so indeed it does require BLANK rather than zero.

Well that (sort of) explains the meaning of that strange 'optional' word, as in: Foreign tax taken off or paid: (Optional)

So where they wrote: The amount entered for 'Foreign tax taken off or paid' must be greater than 0 (zero) or blank. Please amend.

"greater than 0 (zero) or blank" means "(greater than zero) XOR (blank)" - exclusive OR. Rather than "(greater than zero) OR (blank)" - inclusive OR? Which, in English text ought, IMO, to be written as: "greater than 0 (zero), or blank". This is starting to remind me of BODMAS...

I suppose next year they will tweak the software again so it requires a zero, instead of a blank! It is all starting to feel like some kind of game.

[Bouleversee]

Goodness gracious. They really do try to make life difficult, don't they? I was up till the wee small hours this morning finally doing my online personal tax return and hadn't a clue what all those "optionals" meant and found It quite difficult to know where to put PIDs etc. Eventually, I think I got everything entered correctly and thought I'd print out the tax calculation before submitting the return. Having done the calculations myself on the basis of a thread of posts on here a little while ago and worked out I was due a rebate, I was surprised to see it showed I owed them over £1000 to be paid by the end of Jan. whereas I think they owe me nearly £800. I gave up and went to bed without submitting the return.

This morning, I looked at it with a somewhat refreshed brain and having realised last night that the calculation took no account of the payments in advance I had made in Jan. and July last year, went through the whole lot again looking for somewhere to enter those but couldn't find a suitable place so rang HMRC and after a long wait got through to someone who told me that the calculation never showed/included those payments and there was nowhere to enter them and I should just submit the return and wait for it to be sorted out. (I had already filled in my bank details, expecting a rebate). I see there is a note saying "This amount does not take into account any 2017-18 payments on account you may have already made. Why not? What is the point of providing a calculation whose bottom line is completely incorrect, with a demand for payment which is not actually due? This country is run by idiots who waste a great deal of everyone's precious time, including that of the HMRC staff. If I don't get a revised calculation before Jan 31, do I have to pay this demand and then wait for a rebate of it and the overpayment? They are not asking for any other payments on account for 2018-19 so can I assume that the tax code applied to my annuity payments will deal with estimated tax due, though I wonder how they work this out when dividends and interest and their allowances will vary considerably?

Has this been mentioned here before? I presume everyone else has had the same experience and I wondered if any official complaints have been made or will it have to be me writing yet another letter to my MP though I wouldn't waste my energy at this particular moment in time when MPs have much bigger fish to fry, as indeed I have myself.

[modellingman]

...so indeed it does require BLANK rather than zero.

Well that (sort of) explains the meaning of that strange 'optional' word, as in: Foreign tax taken off or paid: (Optional)

So where they wrote: The amount entered for 'Foreign tax taken off or paid' must be greater than 0 (zero) or blank. Please amend.

"greater than 0 (zero) or blank" means "(greater than zero) XOR (blank)" - exclusive OR. Rather than "(greater than zero) OR (blank)" - inclusive OR? Which, in English text ought, IMO, to be written as: "greater than 0 (zero), or blank". This is starting to remind me of BODMAS...

I suppose next year they will tweak the software again so it requires a zero, instead of a blank! It is all starting to feel like some kind of game.

This time last year the online interface was the old HMRC one, which broadly followed the corresponding paper forms. This year it is the new "unified" dotgovdotuk interface, so maybe that is the cause of the blank/zero changes you note. It is possibly caused by styling rules in the "unified" world which require entry fields to be left blank rather than a zero entered (though that is just speculation on my part).

"Optional" is a poor choice of word on the interface designer's part. I think that the intention is to indicate that the field is not mandatory (because it will not be applicable to every individual). I completed the Land and Property pages for UK non-holiday lets a few days ago - every data entry field was marked as "optional". If only. Only a very few fields (such as provision of a telephone number in the taxpayer details section) are genuinely optional.

Interface design is difficult to get right. As designers say (and this illustrates the difficulty and is most definitely NOT aimed at you) no matter how much one tries to idiot-proof things the world always conspires to deliver a better class of idiot.

Personally, I don't think the designers have got it quite right with the new self-assessment interface.The approach of allowing a blank to represent either "not applicable" or 0 is poor since, for example, it fails to trap a potential error of the user declaring the foreign income but then erroneously not declaring the amount of tax (if any) taken off or paid. Was the tax field left blank because the user intended a zero or because the user simply forget to put anything in? Much better to mandate an entry in the tax field (and to allow a zero as being valid) if there is a valid numeric entry in the income field. However, this approach means that the rules for error checking can no longer be applied solely using the contents of the checked field itself, which I suspect is the problem here. You could well be right about next year.

[PinkDalek]

... I see there is a note saying "This amount does not take into account any 2017-18 payments on account you may have already made. Why not? What is the point of providing a calculation whose bottom line is completely incorrect, with a demand for payment which is not actually due? ... If I don't get a revised calculation before Jan 31, do I have to pay this demand and then wait for a rebate of it and the overpayment? ...

Yes, it is a pain, but according to https://www.gov.uk/understand-self-assessment-bill

If you made payments on account last year

You’ll need to deduct any payments on account you made last year towards this year’s bill to work out what you owe.
Log in to your account and click ‘View statements’ to check the payments on account you made last year.


I think it takes a little while (maybe the 72 hours mentioned on that page) for "your account" to be updated. It should then show the repayment due to you.

[Bouleversee]

Many thanks, PD. Utterly ridiculous imo.

[modellingman]

They are not asking for any other payments on account for 2018-19 so can I assume that the tax code applied to my annuity payments will deal with estimated tax due, though I wonder how they work this out when dividends and interest and their allowances will vary considerably?

HMRC's default mode is to assume that the your current year's (2018/19) income will be the same as the previous year (2017/18).

You should be able to check your tax code(s) and what they include through your online account.

[Bouleversee]

Yes, I'll do that when I've completed my other, more complicated and difficult return. I've now submitted the first one and will check after 72 hrs.

[XFool]

Interface design is difficult to get right. As designers say (and this illustrates the difficulty and is most definitely NOT aimed at you) no matter how much one tries to idiot-proof things the world always conspires to deliver a better class of idiot.

Personally, I don't think the designers have got it quite right with the new self-assessment interface.The approach of allowing a blank to represent either "not applicable" or 0 is poor since, for example, it fails to trap a potential error of the user declaring the foreign income but then erroneously not declaring the amount of tax (if any) taken off or paid. Was the tax field left blank because the user intended a zero or because the user simply forget to put anything in? Much better to mandate an entry in the tax field (and to allow a zero as being valid) if there is a valid numeric entry in the income field. However, this approach means that the rules for error checking can no longer be applied solely using the contents of the checked field itself, which I suspect is the problem here. You could well be right about next year.

I have long been baffled by web based UI software, it frequently seems crude and daft to me, apparently ignoring all past understanding of what makes a good UI. The main problem being BLANK (or spaces). Many numbers - credit card numbers; phone numbers; outputs from security card readers - are grouped with spaces, to make them more readable and digestible for humans. But typically you can't enter them as such via web based UIs. Why ever not? It should be a trivial matter to accept spaces as input and for the processing software to discard them. Is it inexperience or just lazy programming?

One problem I have been having with HMRC (see other thread) is when I came to submit my return a few days ago I couldn't log on as I had by then lost my mobile phone service signal, so no PIN! Anyway, today with a weak signal available I managed to log on to HMRC and enter my landline as a backup number for getting the logon PIN.

Even here there was a bit of a wrinkle. They ask if a UK phone number or a Foreign number. Mine is UK so that is what I selected. But even so, they expect a UK number to be entered in 'International' format (they provide the +44 field), which I am OK with and it was accepted and worked. But will everyone understand and know to drop the UK STD code? If entered with a leading zero will the software cope with this? Why does it have to be this confusing?

On original log on via mobile I had asked for a 7 day PIN, assuming this meant I could use the same PIN for seven days. Now find I can log on without even entering a PIN so can only assume having used the PIN once I don't need one for seven days.

Honestly, I do believe I could do a better job.

[XFool]

More ropeyness... I wanted to add a short couple of lines of text about omissions from my 2016-17 return. After typing in the box and pressing SAVE I got the error message:

There was a problem submitting the form

You must:

'Please give any other information in this space' can only contain alpha, numeric and the following special characters: '()*,-./&@£.
The enter (or return) key located on your keyboard is not accepted.
Please amend.

So I removed the new line and resubmitted. Same result. I even tried removing all spaces, same result. I entered text as a single line in Notepad, copied and pasted to box. Same result! Something wrong here...

I had to convert the simple short text sentence to PDF and upload as an attached document.

[felixcanis]

I got that same error whilst adding info to the CGT pages - I needed to provide an address in a free text box and eventually I discovered the post code mustn't have a space.

I completed the feedback section which appears during logout & expressed my dissatisfaction at the 'helpfulness' of the error message- maybe the feedback will be picked up by the programmers.

Felixc

[XFool]

I got that same error whilst adding info to the CGT pages - I needed to provide an address in a free text box and eventually I discovered the post code mustn't have a space.

And I remember filling in some other text box without any problems. Oh yes, the box explaining why my entry for state pension differs from theirs. But this entry now doesn't even appear in the box on my PDF copy of my return. There seem to be lots of inconsistencies with the software.

I completed the feedback section which appears during logout & expressed my dissatisfaction at the 'helpfulness' of the error message- maybe the feedback will be picked up by the programmers.

Um...I was expecting to fill that in too, but for whatever reason I never encountered it.

[PinkDalek]

Oh yes, the box explaining why my entry for state pension differs from theirs.

Might that be because your figures are incorrect?

viewtopic.php?p=100941#p100941

[Bouleversee]

Can one alter one's online return after it has been submitted?

[PinkDalek]

Can one alter one's online return after it has been submitted?

Yes. https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax- ... orrections