Revenue management have acknowledged the significant difficulties with the ROS service during the days in the lead up to 17 November.

There were disruptions in ROS service which occurred on 16 November and the previous day, Tuesday 15 November. As we all know, the most serious outages occurred on the filing day itself, 17 November.

A response in writing from the Revenue Deputy Secretary, Mr Liam Irwin, to the situation as received by ICAI states:

“Let me first of all assure you that we are making every effort to isolate and eliminate the problem. I would make the point that the total downtime has been limited and the system is dealing with a record volume of on-line filing (over 23,000 returns were successfully filed yesterday [Thursday] which was an all time ROS record). That said we are unhappy with any downtime at all and I fully understand the frustrations of those compliant taxpayers and tax advisers who are affected and their concern that they may not meet the filing deadline.

I confirm the assurance I gave you on the phone yesterday [in a conversation with Brian Keegan of ICAI] that no compliant taxpayer who has endeavoured to meet the filing deadline of midnight last night and who has failed to do so because of the ROS difficulties will be disadvantaged in any way - we will certainly not apply interest, penalties or surcharges and you can assure your members of this.”

We would ask members to let us know if it transpires that any attempt is made to levy interest, penalties or surcharges on ROS filers and will continue to monitor this situation on your behalf.