HMRC - note for agents in connection with the opening hours of the OSH on the weekend of 30/31 January

We are issuing this brief note to tell agents about the help they will be able to receive when telephoning the Online Services Helpdesk (OSH) on 30 and 31 January. We hope this will help Agents to plan and prioritise any work they need to do on those days to get their clients’ returns filed on time.

As we all know, the filing deadline falls on a Sunday this year. Every weekend we have to carry out essential processing and maintenance work on our Self Assessment processing system (CESA).This is particularly important during this particular weekend with around 2million SA returns expected in the final week of January.

This means that there will be times when CESA will not be available to our staff in OSH. As OSH staff need access to the CESA system to verify agent/client relationships, view individuals tax accounts, confirm receipt of returns, etc, this will limit the support they will be able to provide to customers, including agents, at those times.

What will the limitations be?
Without CESA, OSH will be limited to giving general advice to agents. They will not be able to carry out the agent/client relationship verification needed to deal with the majority of client specific queries, and therefore very few case-specific functions will be available. We hope knowing this in advance will enable agents to plan their work to enable them to receive any assistance from OSH they need outside the affected times.

When will this happen?
On a normal weekend, OSH provides the full service on which access to CESA depends from 08.00 to 16.30 on Saturdays. Outside those hours, OSH provides only general advice on normal weekends.

On 30 January the normal Saturday full OSH service will be available. On Sunday 31 January, the full OSH service will be available from 08.00 to 20.00. As on a normal weekend, OSH will only be available for general advice after those hours.

Why could agents not be told this earlier?
We have been working to ensure that the CESA downtime is kept as short as possible on the weekend of 30 and 31 January. This is the first year of mass online filing where the deadline has fallen on a Sunday and the planning for the essential processing and maintenance work has only just been finalised. This is therefore the earliest opportunity to tell you about the impact this will have on our OSH services to our customers.