Disappointing first impressions of HMRC’s Income Record Viewer

Missing data and poor user experience leave early users unimpressed.

HMRC launched the new Income Record Viewer near the end of last year. It’s intended to enable accountants to view clients’ personal tax accounts and income history to which they’d not ordinarily have access.

The new service is just available for accountants to view rather than edit, but provides access to a wealth of information such as:

• PAYE information for the current year and the four previous tax years
• employment history including time in employment, taxable benefits
• record of income
• pension information including state and private pension schemes.

To view client records in this way, accountants need authorisation from their clients using the Government Gateway portal along with clients’ national insurance number and their date of birth.

Although the service was first announced in April with a corresponding information page on the Government website, the service wasn’t officially launched until November 2022.

We spoke to early users of the Income Record Viewer for their first impressions.

In theory the Income Record Viewer should be a great tool

Christina Nawrocki, managing partner, Wellers

HMRC’s new information view is generally a very useful tool, but we have already encountered incomplete and factually incorrect data.

We’ve had instances where the account simply states, ‘no details available’, and times where it shows only one record of employment for a client with a longer employment history. Disappointingly, we’ve even experienced state pension income displaying incorrectly. 

So whilst the Income Record Viewer does show some useful information, it’s not fully there yet. It still needs more attention from HMRC to work at 100% and in the meantime, we will continue collating details manually from clients.

Verdict: The Income Record Viewer displays inaccuracies so until these are fixed we must continue to collate manual details from clients.

The requirement to obtain authorisation for every single client is counterintuitive

Amelia Hook, director, Oury Clark

It’s still early days for HMRC’s new view-only portal, so we’re getting used to it. One obvious pain point we’ve seen already is the new authorisation provision. Even though we are already registered as agents for all our existing clients, we must complete new authorisation requests for them once again. This has to be repeated for each individual client, which is extremely time consuming. It’s an additional hoop for agents to jump through in order to complete this year’s returns, and it will ultimately mean more time spent doing each one.

Verdict: User experience needs work and until details such as authorisation are smoothed out, aspects of the Income Record Viewer will be time consuming and inefficient.

Faulty data undermines confidence in the Income Record Viewer

Alan Broome, MD Acumenica Group LTD

In theory, the Income Record Viewer removes speedbumps in the process of obtaining certain information from clients. In practice, there’s often data missing from the viewer, which undermines our confidence in what does show up. We then find ourselves liaising directly with the client anyway as a result.

Additionally, getting any kind of authorisation from HMRC systems is always difficult and this service is no different. Most if not all of my team have experienced issues with the authorisation process. It could be good if it was done en-masse rather than individually per client, but I don’t think that will ever be possible.

Verdict: The theory behind the viewer is great but it does not match up to reality.

Annie Makoff is a freelance journalist and editor.