https://dataingovernment.blog.gov.uk/all-service-assessments-and-self-certification/hmrc/annual-tax-summaries-beta/
Annual Tax Summaries - Beta Assessment
Once a user’s Self Assessment return for the previous tax year has been processed their tax summary will become available for access through the newly released Your Tax Account service as well as HMRC’s existing Online Services. It will also very soon be accessible by Agents on behalf of their clients.
The service will provide the user with a summary of the information that they submitted in their original Self Assessment tax return. This will include the following:
- Income
- Tax and National insurance
- Tax free amounts and adjustments
- Capital gains
- A breakdown of Treasury spend
Department / Agency:
HMRC
Date of Assessment:
22/10/2014
Assessment stage:
Beta
Result of Assessment:
Pass
Lead Assessor:
N. Chowdhury
Service Manager:
T. Britten
Digital Leader:
M. Dearnley
Assessment Report
Annual Tax Summaries is seeking permission to launch as a Beta service.
Outcome of service assessment
After consideration the assessment panel have concluded Annual Tax Summaries has shown sufficient progress and evidence of meeting the Digital by Default Service Standard criteria and should proceed to launch as a Beta.
Reasons
From the assessment, it is clear that Annual Tax Summaries are an experienced multidisciplinary team who have made good progress incorporating user research as a routine part of the development cycle. This has led to significant change in the design of the summaries since the original prototypes that were informed by policy and ministerial contributions.
The panel were also impressed with the attention and knowledge the Service Manager expressed on the operational running of the feature, liaising with Web Operations, Policy, Comms and related HMRC product teams in order to anticipate support issues.
Recommendations
The assessment panel has a few observations which the Annual Tax Summaries team should seek to address as part of its future development.
Integrate with Your Tax Account and Digital Self-Assessment.
Annual Tax Summaries is not a transactional service, but a feature which is to be available as part of Digital Self-Assessment and housed within Your Tax Account. Therefore the panel suggests that for live, the feature is reviewed as part of the assessment for one of these services.
Develop Assisted Digital support based on user need
The team proposes using HMRC’s in-house assisted digital support to support users but this is not yet in place. As an interim measure in beta, the team has arranged to provide assisted digital support by email and through an existing tax telephone helpline, with the phone number communicated to users on the equivalent self-assessment paper forms.
To meet the live assessment criteria, it is not acceptable for services to rely on existing or generic departmental support; teams must evidence how this support meets specific user needs for their service. The team demonstrated some understanding of potential users of self-assessment related digital services but significantly more work needs to be done in public beta. The team’s dedicated user researcher will work on this and the team have a plan to test and measure their assisted digital support through analytics and feedback. The team must test both the interim support and any other proposed assisted digital support to provide evidence that the support they are putting in place meets their specific users’ needs.
Service Manager empowered beyond the digital product
As detailed in the Alpha assessment report, the service manager is responsible for the development of the digital tax summary available within self-assessment, but not the paper tax summary which is part of PAYE. The user does not benefit from the paper and digital products being developed separately, therefore the panel recommends the service manager is empowered to lead a single service, combining the two products until the paper edition can be phased out.
Dedicated support from a Product analyst
The panel recommends that the existing multidisciplinary team is extended to include a Product Analyst in order to analyse the digital analytics gathered during the beta stage. This may not necessarily be a full time resource but someone they can call on to give them actionable data to inform improvements and sprints
For example: The analyst will be able to provide a tagging strategy for the 'service' i.e. event tracking to track the usage of help links etc.
Open Source Code
The panel were encouraged to hear HMRC are making progress in this area, but we are still yet to see any service code published. Publishing source code must be in place for live assessment.
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/choosing-technology#when-to-make-new-software-versus-using-existing-software.
Digital by Default Service Standard criteria
| Criteria | Passed | Criteria | Passed |
| 1 | Yes | 2 | Yes |
| 3 | Yes | 4 | Yes |
| 5 | Yes | 6 | Yes |
| 7 | Yes | 8 | Yes |
| 9 | Yes | 10 | Yes |
| 11 | Yes | 12 | Yes |
| 13 | Yes | 14 | Yes |
| 15 | Yes | 16 | Yes |
| 17 | Yes | 18 | Yes |
| 19 | Yes | 20 | Yes |
| 21 | Yes | 22 | Yes |
| 23 | Yes | 24 | Yes |
| 25 | Yes | 26 | Yes |
