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Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

Practical Issues
Bouleversee
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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380259

Postby Bouleversee » January 24th, 2021, 1:29 pm

XFool wrote:
Bouleversee wrote:I said earlier: One can't help wondering whether this is a deliberate plot to make late filers pay fines because they can't now do their returns before the 31st. "

On second thoughts, that can't be it because my son and others who haven't yet filed their returns are able to get onto their accounts and continue with filling in the required information. So must be the lack of a UK passport.

I don't have a current passport. So cannot be that.


So what on earth generates this charade for some people but not for everyone, then? My son tried again to progress the return this morning but it stalls at the same point, i.e. after the requested figures from the previous return and my address, and says the service is not available and they are experiencing technical problems. Hopeless. Garbage in, garbage out, I expect.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380288

Postby PinkDalek » January 24th, 2021, 2:57 pm

Bouleversee wrote:
XFool wrote:
Bouleversee wrote:... On second thoughts, that can't be it because my son and others who haven't yet filed their returns are able to get onto their accounts and continue with filling in the required information. So must be the lack of a UK passport.

I don't have a current passport. So cannot be that.


So what on earth generates this charade for some people but not for everyone, then? ...


I do feel for you and others impacted but can't really follow what is happening (especially on a topic that spans a number of pages here).

The lack of passport issue does get mentioned many times over at https://community.hmrc.gov.uk/forums, such as here https://community.hmrc.gov.uk/forums/customerforums/sa/c01530d6-a255-eb11-8fed-00155d975df7, and it may be an idea for you or your son to bookmark this discussion over there (which may well be JohnB's) and act accordingly:

https://community.hmrc.gov.uk/forums/customerforums/sa/98ff6de3-8a4e-eb11-8fed-00155d975291

bungeejumper
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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380291

Postby bungeejumper » January 24th, 2021, 3:05 pm

Apologies if this has been mentioned before - I haven't had time to read the whole thread right back from the start. But I've finally managed to get into my wife's self-assessment form, after only two days of tearing at what little remains of my hair. Grrrrrr! And all because she switched her telephone provider last year.....

....Which had meant that she was forced to start using a new phone number, because her old number couldn't be ported to the new account. (Don't even ask - just don't. :x ) Which meant that when the HMRC gateway was trying to send her the access code for this year, it sent it to a dead phone number qui n'existe plus.

And if you thought that would have prompted the HMRC website to say "sorry, that isn't working, got an alternative number we can try?", you'd have won this year's GHOTY prize. (That's Gullible Hopeful Of The Year). Nope, it said, you'll need to give us your passport details, and details of any new credit agreements (she had none), or your P60 (she doesn't have one), or your state and private pension details for the year before last, to the exact last pound, and we'll chop you off at the legs if you can't guess the same figure as us within four tries.

There was, of course, an option for "I haven't got these records, what do I do now?" Clicking on it produced two options: "Try later" and "Go back to the start and have another go." Neither of which seemed to answering the effing question. :evil:

Four hours of desperate drawer-rummaging later, my wife found a draft printout of last year's tax form with the pension figures on them, and we were very graciously allowed far enough into the account to propose a new phone number. And then things started to get a little easier.

......But not before I'd had to stop HMRC's attempt to automatically stop sending paper-mail notifications about important matters such as impending fines. Instead, it said, they'd be sent to my wife's HMRC account. And we were given a neat little text box to explain why we were being so obstinate?

"Because I don't effing well spend my every waking hour signed in to your diabolical Kafka website," I thundered on her behalf. "I mean, it's not exactly Facebook, is it? Logging in once a year is once a year too often, you morons, and I'll see you in hell before I jump through any more stupid hoops so that you can do less work and fine me for the pleasure of not knowing what's going on inside your cretinous little minds."

Then I deleted that and wrote "don't use the internet" instead. :lol:

BJ

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380302

Postby Gengulphus » January 24th, 2021, 3:42 pm

bungeejumper wrote:......But not before I'd had to stop HMRC's attempt to automatically stop sending paper-mail notifications about important matters such as impending fines. Instead, it said, they'd be sent to my wife's HMRC account. And we were given a neat little text box to explain why we were being so obstinate?

"Because I don't effing well spend my every waking hour signed in to your diabolical Kafka website," I thundered on her behalf. "I mean, it's not exactly Facebook, is it? Logging in once a year is once a year too often, you morons, and I'll see you in hell before I jump through any more stupid hoops so that you can do less work and fine me for the pleasure of not knowing what's going on inside your cretinous little minds."

Then I deleted that and wrote "don't use the internet" instead. :lol:

I wouldn't do that - you clearly do use the internet, and lying to the taxman isn't a good idea. I very much doubt that this particular instance of it would be noticed at all, and even if it were, I very much doubt that you could get into any sort of trouble for it, but it's a bad habit to get into... Besides, one can at least hope that the more people make it clear that there is a problem here, the more likely it is that solving the problem will rise to the top of their priority list.

So I think I'd have said something like "I don't log on to my HMRC account often enough for this to be a timely method of communication. And even if I did, I recently experienced great difficulty in logging on to the account after a change of phone number, due to the totally excessive obscurity and ambiguity of the security questions I was expected to answer. I cannot take the risk of ending up locked out of my account by a similar incident and unable to access your communication."

Though something more like your original version would be very tempting!

Gengulphus

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380306

Postby Bouleversee » January 24th, 2021, 3:55 pm

Thanks to all. Much appreciated. I think that was John B's posts.

I don't know why I was asked to answer these extra security questions in the first place but, thanks to Sainsbury's I would be able to answer the credit check question, assuming they don't want more info than the start date, but it won't let me get that far. As I said previously, I shall ring them tomorrow and play merry hell. I think I would have sent your original comment, BJ. You obviously have more patience than I do.

Edit: I should have said we have to enter the info. again each time; it has not been saved. At no point was my UTR or NI no. requested.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380331

Postby XFool » January 24th, 2021, 5:13 pm

bungeejumper wrote:Apologies if this has been mentioned before - I haven't had time to read the whole thread right back from the start. But I've finally managed to get into my wife's self-assessment form, after only two days of tearing at what little remains of my hair. Grrrrrr! And all because she switched her telephone provider last year.....

....Which had meant that she was forced to start using a new phone number, because her old number couldn't be ported to the new account. (Don't even ask - just don't. :x ) Which meant that when the HMRC gateway was trying to send her the access code for this year, it sent it to a dead phone number qui n'existe plus.

And if you thought that would have prompted the HMRC website to say "sorry, that isn't working, got an alternative number we can try?", you'd have won this year's GHOTY prize. (That's Gullible Hopeful Of The Year).

In fact logon to HMRC SA always does ask which of two phone numbers you want to use, in my case landline or mobile. But I guess you have to have two numbers already registered for this to work. Obviously didn't help your wife, I assume she doesn't have a mobile. If you do, perhaps she could register that one?

bungeejumper wrote:Nope, it said, you'll need to give us your passport details, and details of any new credit agreements (she had none), or your P60 (she doesn't have one), or your state and private pension details for the year before last, to the exact last pound, and we'll chop you off at the legs if you can't guess the same figure as us within four tries.

Not GOV.UK Verify (already had GG registration) but NI number and details from P60 (plus phone number, of course) were, if I remember correctly, what was needed the first time I registered for my online Personal Digital Tax Account/SA, after logging in to GG.

So we have found one reason why this problem crops up - no currently valid registered phone number for verification by PIN.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380359

Postby bungeejumper » January 24th, 2021, 6:21 pm

XFool wrote:In fact logon to HMRC SA always does ask which of two phone numbers you want to use, in my case landline or mobile. But I guess you have to have two numbers already registered for this to work. Obviously didn't help your wife, I assume she doesn't have a mobile. If you do, perhaps she could register that one?

Thanks for the thought. My wife does have a mobile, but she is firmly of the opinion that it's there for making emergency outward phone calls and not much else, so it's rarely switched on. :D Which is logical in its own way, because we don't have a reliable 2G signal in our home. I can't receive the access codes for my own quarterly VAT returns without going out and legging it up the village and back.

Nor is that particularly unusual - my daughter's entire village in the Midlands (300 houses) is a 100% mobile notspot! But that would be another peeve entirely, and I was trying to avoid over-complicating the issue for the present company.
Not GOV.UK Verify (already had GG registration) but NI number and details from P60 (plus phone number, of course) were, if I remember correctly, what was needed the first time I registered for my online Personal Digital Tax Account/SA, after logging in to GG.

Wife doesn't have a current P60 (she's retired), just the state pension info, and she hasn't done anything in ten years that might have required getting a credit score - which I think is how HMRC operates the Sainsbury (etc) checkups? Strange but true, there are millions of people out there whose lives just don't intersect with the wired world in the way that some public authorities like to suppose. ;)

But that's another story. Gengulphus was quite right to chide me just now for suggesting that my wife doesn't use the internet. It would be more accurate to say that, when it comes to dealing with people who make life as complicated as HMRC, she leaves it to me to sort it all out. What's certainly true is that neither of us is in the habit of logging regularly into our GG accounts just to see whether HMRC's got anything exciting or new to tell us? A letter in the post is nine times as likely to get read promptly. Which is why I've opted for it.

BJ

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380367

Postby Bouleversee » January 24th, 2021, 6:39 pm

Lucky wife to have someone to do it for her. I don't use my mobile other than to receive calls from Santander if I want to move money and need a code for that so my home no. was registered with HMRC and duly received the activation code. Why should anything else be required?

I'm pretty sure (I wasn't the one sitting in front of the screen) that I wasn't given the option of a P60 or State Pension query which I would have had no difficulty in answering since my annuity companies send me P60s and I get a letter from DWPS re the amount I get from the state pension and they are on file as well as being on the previous tax return. Maybe they were in the figures extracted by son from that. I was too busy reading all these posts at that time. Perhaps what has caused the technical problems and unavailability of the service is that the system doesn't know why the hell it is putting me through this either and doesn't know how to resolve this situation. :lol:
Last edited by Bouleversee on January 24th, 2021, 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Alaric
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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380368

Postby Alaric » January 24th, 2021, 6:40 pm

bungeejumper wrote: What's certainly true is that neither of us is in the habit of logging regularly into our GG accounts just to see whether HMRC's got anything exciting or new to tell us? A letter in the post is nine times as likely to get read promptly. Which is why I've opted for it.


I've done exactly the same by much the same reasoning. I've avoided login problems by having a functioning mobile phone number, but wouldn't it be a better system design by HMRC if like the NHS or a bank, they sent a text message when they wanted to alert you to something important?

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380369

Postby Bouleversee » January 24th, 2021, 6:42 pm

That wouldn't work in my case, Alaric. I never look at my mobile and never text anyone. Why not an email, which I use all the time. They have, as I have said earlier, been sending me emails (assuming they are genuine and not fraudulent) reminding me my return is due for some time, as if I didn't know!

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380374

Postby Lootman » January 24th, 2021, 6:49 pm

bungeejumper wrote:What's certainly true is that neither of us is in the habit of logging regularly into our GG accounts just to see whether HMRC's got anything exciting or new to tell us? A letter in the post is nine times as likely to get read promptly. Which is why I've opted for it.

Indeed. At the risk of my sounding repetitive, it continues to baffle me that all this extra information (passport details, driving license, credit card info, phone numbers etc.) is required only for the online submission of a tax return. None of that extra information is required for the paper submission of a tax return.

So what is it that HMRC are so worried about with online submission that doesn't matter a jot for paper submission? It would clearly be easier for someone to submit a fake tax return for me in paper form because the extra checks and information are not needed.

Of course it is similar to accessing bank accounts where online access these days needs two factor authentication whereas I can give you a cheque with none of that. Is the difference that with paper access there is my written signature? And with all the advances of technology, reliance on an old-fashioned signature still trumps all that technology?

As an aside I have this (completely unsupported) theory that a paper return is also better because it means your data is not immediately available online. The data would instead have to be transcribed. If that means the taxman holds less computerised data for me then that might reduce the number of queries and investigations that are triggered by automated cross-checks.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380384

Postby XFool » January 24th, 2021, 7:34 pm

Lootman wrote:
bungeejumper wrote:What's certainly true is that neither of us is in the habit of logging regularly into our GG accounts just to see whether HMRC's got anything exciting or new to tell us? A letter in the post is nine times as likely to get read promptly. Which is why I've opted for it.

Indeed. At the risk of my sounding repetitive, it continues to baffle me that all this extra information (passport details, driving license, credit card info, phone numbers etc.) is required only for the online submission of a tax return.

It isn't! - Normally. Which is what this thread is about...

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380400

Postby Bouleversee » January 24th, 2021, 9:16 pm

A thought has just occurred to me: on lst Dec. last year, I noticed that the monthly payment for my annuity from Phoenix Life was about a third less than usual. Obviously I rang to query and was told this was due to a system error; too much tax had been deducted (not just from mine) and paid to HMRC and they were going to have to claim it back individually. I heard nothing more and then on Jan. 1 there was no payment at all so I rang again and got nowhere. On Jan. 8 a larger sum than normal was paid into my acct. but less than the sum which a letter received in the meantime had said was owing and with which I agreed. More phone calls and emails. No response but the balance due was finally paid last Thursday. Do you suppose the tax reclaim business done by Phoenix could have left a question mark over my acct. and this is what has triggered the present situation?

I'll let you know what happens if I succeed in getting through on the phone tomorrow morning. I'd better have an early night.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380515

Postby UncleEbenezer » January 25th, 2021, 10:35 am

Bouleversee wrote:A thought has just occurred to me: on lst Dec. last year, I noticed that the monthly payment for my annuity from Phoenix Life was about a third less than usual.


Will she notice? Will she have the perseverance and determination to pursue it?

Obviously I rang to query


Yes she will. But what conclusion? OK, don't mess with this one? Or maybe We need to work harder on grinding her down?

I don't bother to query excess tax during the year. Which is why my tax return is an annual opportunity for a refund of any such nonsense. And why a few (maybe 3 or so) years back when they told me they no longer required a tax return, I submitted one anyway. I find it makes for an easier life than chasing anomalies as they happen.

Regarding the thread, I signed up for gov. ID verification some years ago, and have had no problem since then. Sadly I've no recollection of the process that would contribute to this thread.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380526

Postby Bouleversee » January 25th, 2021, 10:59 am

Uncle E:

All widows and widowers had been affected so action had to be taken anyway. I should think most people would worry about several hundred pounds going missing at Christmas time and then no payment at all being made on Jan. 1 and wouldn't want to wait for the 2020-21 return to be submitted and agreed to get a tax rebate.
Last edited by Bouleversee on January 25th, 2021, 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380529

Postby Bouleversee » January 25th, 2021, 11:02 am

John B:
When you complained to HMRC, did you ring the usual Self Assessment queries no: 0300200310? I had written down 03002003319 for complaints (can't remember where I got that from) but it isn't recognised so I rang the above at 8 am and wasted an hour getting nowhere. I won't waste your time with all the rubbish which didn't gel with the actuality.

I was surprised to find that I had registered for voice recognition. I thought I had only done that with my bank.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380536

Postby Bouleversee » January 25th, 2021, 11:18 am

I am on the phone to that no. again and was put through to a chap and started telling him the problem and then he disappeared, without saying he was putting me on hold, and the music started again. Debating whether to put the phone down or wait and see what happens, running up a large phone bill presumably. Not good for my blood pressure.

Edit: I gave up after a long interval. My guess is that he didn't have a clue how to explain any of it and ducked out.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380548

Postby JohnB » January 25th, 2021, 11:47 am

0300 200 3300

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisat ... about-hmrc

there are 2 levels of complaint handlers. The first have more authority than the ordinary call handlers, but tend to refer to HMRC in the third party as "they have decided this, we can't do anything". Second level seem able to actually access other parts of HMRC.

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380551

Postby Bouleversee » January 25th, 2021, 11:54 am

Thanks, John. I am holding on on that number a.t.m. but I think it will just put me through to the normal SA queries people. Should I start by telling the responder that I want to make a complaint or just go through the whole history again?

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Re: Impossible extra security checks with government Gateway doing SA

#380554

Postby JohnB » January 25th, 2021, 11:58 am

Say you would like to make a formal complaint, and ask for a complaint number. They won't give you one at first level, but it shows you are serious. Record the call too.


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