Filing online grows in popularity
The 31 January self assessment tax deadline has passed for another year. In a recent press release HMRC confirmed that this year saw a 50% increase in the number of online filings, from 3.8million to almost 5.8million.
This amounts to almost two thirds of self assessment tax returns being filed online. The largest amounts of filings were unsurprisingly received on the last working day of the month, Friday 30 January 2009 when almost 390,000 returns were filed online.
The huge growth on online filings can also be partly attributed to the change in deadline for paper filings which moved to 31 October for the first time this year, a full three months before the online filing deadline.
The Permanent Secretary of Tax at HMRC, Dave Hartnett, commented in the press release that:
"HMRC’s Self Assessment online and other Internet services enable people to do business with government in the way we know they want to. The outstanding popularity of online filing demonstrated by today’s figures is the foundation on which we are transforming the way taxpayers interact with us."