The Digital Self-Assessment service has passed its live Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment. You can now access this via your tax dashboard online. It will make self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people.
The following short film from some of the team looks at how it will work:
This is just one of the services to recently pass the live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment from the government's Transformation Programme. This exemplar service has been public beta since June 2014 and we have over 1.24 million customers who have opted in for paperless correspondence. So far, we have stopped over 430,000 pieces of post.
You can find the Digital Self-Assessment service here.
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Transcript
Digital Self Assessment
Faye Churchill, Product Manager, Digital Self Assessment
We let self assessment customers opt in to going into a paperless service, which means they don’t get lots of pieces of paper from HMRC. They get some nice digital messages from us instead.
Saheel Sankriwala, Service Manager, Digital Self Assessment
Prior to that, it was just paper. They were fairly confusing, reams and reams of paper, but, yes, the digital alerts replaced that with these clear, concise messages.
Faye Churchill
Before the digital service, there were lots and lots of pieces of paper that we used to send to customers. We did find that some people were struggling with those letters. They did not know what it meant for them personally. The new service personalises it a bit more. It’s tailored to their circumstances, so hopefully when they read the message, they know exactly what they need to and when they need to do it.
Richard Johnston, Developer, Digital Self Assessment
The main benefit is that they don’t have these pieces of paper. They get to see all of their previous correspondence in one place online.
Faye Churchill
You pop your email address in, and we’ll send you an email back. You click on the link on that, and then you are signed up for paperless, simple as that.
Saheel Sankriwala
It’s quick, it’s easy to use, it’s fast to get set up, it’s secure. These are all the things that our user research suggested was important to customers.
Richard Johnston
The user feedback is very good. It’s up in the 80 to 90% range of good feedback, as in people who like it.
Faye Churchill
One particular favourite of mine was from a fisherman. He was out there in the North Sea and he opted in to going paperless. He said, “This is just brilliant for me.” He said, “I'm hardly ever at home, and to be able to have a paperless service is fantastic”.
