Over the weekend, I completed – and sent off – my Self-Assessment Tax Return to Your Friends And Mine at HMCE.  The deadline for receiving them is October 31st (i.e. this Saturday) so I’ve only just scraped it this year, having been really really good with it last year.

I know, I could do it all online, and have ’til January 31st to fill it in etc. – but I still don’t trust the online system. I wrote about this a couple of years back, and my feelings are still the same. Mainly, I’m happy to spend the money and use the Special Delivery stuff to get the tax return in – it just means I’ve got a signed confirmation that the Tax Return has been received where it’s been sent.  I’ve been bitten by that before, the entire “Oh no, we haven’t received it” from HMCE. Of course, if you say you haven’t received something from them, it’s a case of “Well we sent it, so you must have received it”, but it’s not the same thing when it’s time to send stuff to them.

Basically, when it comes to sending documents to HMCE, it always pays to be paranoid. Always assume that they are either :

1. Vindictive
2. Inefficient beyond the dreams of man
3. Both

and you’ll be OK.

It’s because of that – OK, it’s partly because of that – that I still don’t trust the online submission of tax returns. Yes, you can be pretty sure they’ve received it – but when it comes to HMRC, “pretty sure” simply isn’t sure enough. I feel the same way about HMCE’s online submission as I do about the people who store all their important data/files with Google, Amazon or some other internet cloud-based server – in other words, “Expect it to get lost. Expect it to get hacked.”

My tax return is on paper. Yes, I know it’ll end up being clocked in to the HMCE ‘System’. That’s fine. But letting their system be the only place it’s held? Sod that. I’ve got a photocopy of the tax return. I know where the figures came from, and I’ve got them recorded. I expect HMCE’s copy of the document to get lost, edited, hacked or mislaid. If/when it happens, I’ve got my own hard-copy backup.  If you’ve done all the calculations on-line and not printed out the results (or even better, screenshots) and/or received confirmation from the system of those figures, what proof have you got of what you filled in?

Even if it’s simply that the electronic version gets corrupted, if HMCE also have it on paper then there’s some way they can recover the information without me even needing to be involved. If they only have an electronic version, then lots of people are going to be screwed if anything does happen.

So while I can, I’ll stick with doing my tax return on paper and sending it in to them. When they eventually go to “Online only”, I’ll still make sure I’ve got a printout of the entire thing, along with all the figures I’ve used to calculate it.

Call me paranoid, I don’t mind. Frankly, I’ve been kicked in the nuts by HMCE too many times to not be paranoid. And that’s not paranoia – that’s just common sense.