HMRC's managing pension scheme service is unavailable for more than a week, sparking frustration among providers as they cannot service clients properly.
According to a bulletin on HMRC’s website, since January 25 at 4:15pm until February 5 at 10am the online service will be unavailable “due to unexpected circumstances”.
HMRC said: “If you were using the service when it became unavailable, any information entered will have been saved from the last time you pressed ‘save and continue’.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Nathan Bridgeman, director at SeaBridge Ssas, said the downtime meant providers would not be able to service their clients properly.
He said: “It beggars belief that with all their resources HMRC cannot get this back up and running within hours rather than days.
"Not being able to provide a scheme’s PSTR number to a ceding scheme stops pension transfers and time sensitive property purchases costing scheme members thousands of pounds. Totally unacceptable."
Martin Tilley said while any outage was “not ideal” it was especially important at this time of year when there “is usually peak activity on the site around January 31 month end”.
“Whilst most administrators will have concluded their year end submissions, inevitably some will have cases running close to the deadline,” Tilley said.
“I’m also aware that the extended outage has prevented one Ssas administrator from simply accessing a scheme registration screenshot required to allow a transfer into their Ssas required urgently for a property purchase.”
Paul Stewart, founder and managing director of Segmented Solutions Limited, which provides information covering all aspects of Ssas pensions, said a big part of the firm’s work is to access the current system on a daily basis to upload new pension schemes, and to appoint new scheme administrators.
He said: “We are also asked to provide screenshots of this system with the time and date showing, so that pension transfers can be completed.
“We did not expect this system to be totally offline for the busiest week of the year - the week leading up to 31st January.
“I was hoping that HMRC would have emailed all administrators if the system was to be 'down' for any reason - so we'd have time to quickly do what we needed.”
A HMRC spokesperson said: “We apologise for the impact this is having on users. We quickly identified the problem and are working hard to resolve it.”
amy.austin@ft.com
