Author: Yvette Lamidey
Published in: PAYadvice
Date: May 2006
Taxation: Electronic Delivery
Data Provisioning Services
The new data Provisioning Service will replace the current Secure Mailbox System (SMS) and provide a more user friendly service for receiving tax codes and archiving the data.
Data Provisioning Service
Users of the Internet service for in-year forms tax code changes, Student Loan notifications, P45, P46, P46 car would have been using the Secure Mailbox Service that sits on the UK government gateway either directly via the portal on the HMRC website or through their payroll software. This service has been replaced by a new Data Provisioning Service, DPS. The SMS will remain in place solely for true human to human messages and will be replaced by an HMRC secure mail service this summer.
The DPS is not a message based service; users will in effect be downloading data to their systems or into excel spreadsheets using the .csv facility from a database.
Many payroll systems have incorporated this functionality in their software from 2006/7, including those that hadn't previously supported the SMS system; and so you may find that you can now access the DPS directly from your system.
The majority of systems that access the DPS directly have been designed to check for new data since the last time that you ‘logged on' to the DPS. The data within DPS will be held for at least four years and it will enable you to view historical data at employee level – although best done by accessing the DPS via the HMRC portal on the website and using the tools available.
Any data in respect of the 2006/7 year i.e. effective from 6 th April will be accessed via the DPS only. If you haven't done so already it might be advisable to check your SMS account one last time since all other forms with an issue date of up to and including 5 th April will have been posted to the SMS including SL1 or SL2 forms which won't actually be actioned until 6 th April or later.
The 2005/6 incentive letters will be issued to the DPS on or after 1 st June 2006 .
If you are accessing the DPS via the portal on the HMRC website you will notice a marked difference. There are options available to access data for 2005/6 and data for 2006/7. The new viewer includes a query mechanism and displays the data in tabular form. The DPS will still allow you to download data via .csv file into excel spreadsheets for data entry and archiving or to upload onto your system.
The DPS will also be used for the in-year forms submitted by employers from 6 th April.
The government gateway SMS service will be decommissioned approx. July 2006. It is therefore imperative that you ensure you have archived all of the data in your SMS box by end of June as once it has been decommissioned you won't be able to access the data.
‘You've got mail alerts'
If you want to receive e-mail notification that there are forms to be collected from the DPS you will need to register your e-mail address. Even if you had previously been registered for the old SMS service you will need to re-register since these e-mail addresses, for data protection reasons, couldn't be copied from the government gateway to the Revenue gateway.
Log on to the HMRC PAYE portal using your existing credentials. On reaching the PAYE Online page, click on the link ‘provide us with an email address', which can be found at the right hand side of the page within the ‘View PAYE notices' section.
This will not affect any other filing service that you may have registered an email address with but you should ensure that all such addresses are kept up to date.
Agents' ‘view your clients'
Agents can only pick up codings and other messages that have been sent within 7 days when logging on and accessing their client list. Any codings that have been issued to the DPS prior to that have to be accessed via the individual employer reference. We are talking to HMRC about this functionality and asking that the time limit is extended however, any changes to this functionality cannot be considered until after the filing peak.
Agents and employers registered as agents are therefore encouraged to check on a weekly basis for any coding changes etc.
Yvette Lamidey
Yvette Lamidey is director of Paris and Parks Consulting
www.parisandparks.com