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HMRC have decided to bring their Shared Workspace pilot to a close - a move that has been described as 'frustrating' for agents.
In a leaflet sent to participating accountancy firms, the Revenue announced the end to the secure online work area.
It said: 'Shared Workspace began with a number of agents in South Wales who agreed to pilot the service as a collaborative solution for handling enquiry work.
'The results were encouraging and the pilot was expanded to local compliance in London and Anglia, with the aim of assessing the viability of the system across a wider business environment.
'The pilot has been evaluated and the findings have shown that Shared Workspace is most successful when there is high frequency of contact or high volumes of data.'
The statement continued: 'As the pilot involved low frequency of contact and low volumes of data for each customer the benefits are nominal for HMRC and its customers.
'Following on from the above the pilot will come to an end on 1 May 2008 and the Shared Workspace pilot rooms will be closed.
'With immediate effect you should cease to add information/documents to the agent shared workspace rooms.
'By 30 April 2008 you should extract/download any information you may need for future purposes from the agent Shared Workspace rooms.
'We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your contribution to the pilot. The exercise has proved immensely valuable and your involvement has helped make shared workspace a unique and groundbreaking new HMRC online service.'
Baker Tilly's Mike Down responded to the HMRC announcement by saying: 'If our experience is anything to go by, I am sure that many agents have found this outcome to be frustrating.
'We sought to contribute constructively in the expanded pilot out of one of our local offices and invested time which now turns out to have been wasted.
'Despite attending an HMRC presentation (August 2007) and completing registration forms (September 2007), we were initially unable to upload our details because of long running maintenance and service enhancements at the HMRC end.'
He added: 'We were told that Shared Workspace would be accessible by mid-February 2008 and details of our “customer nominated contacts” were duly submitted via the HMRC website.
'An email response was then received indicating that HMRC were having problems with approving such requests through the inbox.
'Approval was never received so sadly we were unable to add to “frequency of contact” or “volume” as we never actually got to use Shared Workspace.'
