PAYE online for agents - upcoming changes

27 April, 2021

HMRC have provided the following update on changes to the PAYE online for agents service:

"PAYE online for agents: Liabilities and payments viewer - coming soon

In 2015, HMRC introduced a new service (then known as Agents Online Self Serve (AOSS)) which allowed agents to opt in to see the liabilities and payments of employer clients.  Some 25,000 agents use the service every quarter.

There were some issues with the data, including that it did not show Apprenticeship Levy.  Agents also disliked the inconsistency with the screens that the client saw through their Business Tax Account, and larger firms felt excluded as they could not opt in for the service. 

HMRC committed to improve the service, and that work is ongoing, but we wanted to share with you an Agents guide to the new screens - see here.  These were released to 5 agents in February and HMRC’s thanks go out to them for putting the service through its paces;

  • The new screens are exactly the same as the client sees - data for a tax month will appear on the 12th following the end of the tax month. 
  • The data quality issues have been resolved. 

Over the past few weeks, more agents have been given access to the new screens; we are managing this as an incremental rollout so that we can ensure, at each stage, that the service is running well.  It seems likely, in May, we will allow some larger firms access to the service - again, on an incremental basis.

The performance and accuracy of this service is really important to the Digital Service Team, so if you are seeing the new screens, and you see data that appears to be incorrect, we would encourage you to click the “Get help using this service” link, leave several sentences of description of the problem, and send screen grabs so that we can resolve any problem as fast as possible."