Don't delay, file your tax return today!

Great to see some tax-related news from the BBC that's reasonably accurate today. Yes, I'm talking about tax return filing behaviour in the UK. If you want to take a look at their article it can be found here https://bbc.in/2M3QOIq courtesy of BBC News. What's interesting though is that HMRC published this information on 1 February 2018 (https://bit.ly/2Fz7pzs courtesy of HMRC), although I suppose I should still applaud the BBC for bringing the plight of all of us humble tax practitioners to light. Perhaps, at last, our clients will understand why we look like zombies at the end of January (and maybe they'll get their tax papers to us a bit sooner)! For those who don't want to click through all the links and try to extract the facts, I'll set them out here:

• 11,433,349 Self Assessment returns were due for 2016/17
• 10,687,761 returns were received by midnight on 31 January 2018 (93.5% of total issued)
• Around 745,588 Self Assessment returns were still outstanding on 1 February 2018
• 9,916,430 returns were filed online (92.8%)
• 771,331 returns were filed on paper (7.22%)
• more than 4,852,744 returns were received online in January 2018 (44.8% of the total received)
• 1,290,948 returns were received on 30 and 31 January 2018 (26.6 % of total returns received in January)
• busiest hour: 4pm to 5pm on 31 January 2018 60,596 returns received (1,010 per minute; 17 per second)
• 389,849 payments transactions were handled on 31 January 2018

The really surprising thing is, go and apply these stats to your owns clients, you'll find those percentages are not far out. At the time of writing this, we're still waiting for about 25% of our clients to send us their tax information... Have a productive January 2019 folks!