HMRC online tax calculator crashes on its first day

After collecting £437billion in tax last year, you would have thought HM Revenue and Customs could afford to create a decent ‘tax calculator’.

But the office was forced to apologise yesterday after the online tool imploded within hours of its launch.

The calculator – to be found on HMRC’s website – is meant to allow the country’s 29.7million taxpayers to understand exactly how much they pay each year in income tax and National Insurance.

The launch of the tax calculator tool on the HMRC website managed to crash it on its very first day

But it could not keep up with the demand and was either working slowly or not at all. However, the app version of the calculator, which can be downloaded on to mobile phones, was said to be working correctly.

  More... TRY FOR YOURSELF: The HMRC Tax Calculator

The calculator had been announced by the Chancellor in his Budget in March last year.

FROM TODAY ONWARDS IT'S NOW 'YOUR' MONEY

Today is the first this year that we started to earn money for ourselves instead of the taxman.Tax Freedom Day is calculated each year by think tank the Adam Smith Institute by subtracting the money taken in all forms of tax from net national income.This year we all had to work 149 days to pay off that tax.Dr Eamonn Butler, the institute’s director, said the theoretical date is ‘the plainest way to show what the tax burden really is’.TFD was on May 28 in 2011, making it two days later this year, including a leap year day.

It should, for example, spell out that if you received an annual salary of £25,000 last year, you paid £3,378 in income tax and £2,087 in National Insurance.

This burden does not include any other taxes – everything from stamp duty to VAT, to insurance premium tax.

The calculator – when it works – will also reveal how the money is spent. For the worker on £25,000, for example, the biggest share of their taxes – £1,819 – goes on ‘welfare’.

The HMRC Tax Calculator went live at 9am yesterday.

By midday, bosses admitted it had stopped working properly, and was still not working last night.

More than 400,000 had tried to use it  during the first three hours and HMRC admitted it was surprised by the level of interest.

Robert Oxley, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: ‘If the system was simpler, then we might not need the latest technology simply to understand how much we are handing to the taxman each month.’

Last year the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank criticised the tax system as ‘overly complex’.

An HMRC spokesman said: ‘It was the first day the online calculator has been available and as a result it is extremely busy. This has resulted in a much slower service than we would like and for which we apologise. A full service is being restored and the mobile app is unaffected.’

The calculator is available via this link and the phone app can be downloaded free from the Apple Store or Google Play.