It’s That Time Again!
I’ve been putting this off. It often spoils my January as I put it out of mind as long as I can, knowing that there is a deadline looming, while turning to any other possible activity in order to postpone the annoyance and frustration of finding a whole lot of numbers to put in their worthless online forms to make it easier for THEM but not for US who pay them. This time last year, they were an utter disgrace and I vented my frustration here by listing their errors and lack of intelligent thought which had gone into creating their system - and I say that as a long-time computer user, programmer, software developer and web designer. I’d be ashamed if I as an individual had created something with anywhere near the level of user-unfriendliness they did and their efforts presumably occupied hundreds of people and cost us all millions.
I’ve found the piece of paper I’d written my login details on from last year which they took weeks of delay before troubling themselves to send so I could begin this painful process. Then they had the cheek to complain that I was late! A few minutes ago I began by typing in the web address hmrc.gov.uk and it wasn’t recognised. This seems bad already. It turns out you have to put www before the address, which is pretty poor. How many professional web sites actually need the www? Not many. I make it optional though I suppose there could be a reason to require that I enter www, I can’t think what it might be. This is poor from the start.
How I hate the utter stupidity of the online tax system. I’ve spent about two minutes so far and their worthless unhelpful system has already reported a navigation error!
More snippets of joy to come, I expect.