@gdsteam invent the right angle

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Introducing GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Chris Mitchell	Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	GOV.UK Verify and Mydex CIC
26-03-2015	Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn	GOV.UK Verify: Objectives for live
26-03-2015	Mike Bracken	It’s people who make transformation happen
27-03-2015	David Rennie	Working with the private sector to verify identity
27-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Turning the tanker: digital transformation done right
27-03-2015	Mike Beavan	Looking back at the exemplars
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Not the HMRC of old
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Data as a public asset
29-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation
29-03-2015	Liam Maxwell	Better for less
30-03-2015	Martha Lane Fox	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (text) (text) (text)

Let's take a look at Chris Mitchell's 25 March 2015 offering. It won't take long.

Digital self-assessment is ready to go live. That's Chris's message:

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.

"10 million people". That's a lot of people. "Tax dashboard"? Clearly this is something to do with tax, self-assessment, tax returns, ... Digital self-assessment. It's big:

This exemplar service has been public beta since June 2014 and we have over 1.24 million customers ...

Hang on a minute. "June 2014"?

This service Chris Mitchell is talking about was first released to the public in June 2014?

But DMossEsq clearly remembers receiving his user ID for Self Assessment Online, as Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs called it then, all of seven years ago. You can see HMRC's letter dated 31 January 2008 when they sent DMossEsq's user ID and activation PIN for the service.

So just what is this service that Chris Mitchell, a service manager for GDS, has been incubating for months and years?

Take a look at his 25 March 2015 blog post. What he and his team claim to have added to the work already done by HMRC is an option to go paperless. You were already able to submit returns on-line. You could already see your old returns on-line and HMRC's letters calculating how much you owed them and their new tax codes for you, year by year. That was already on-line.

What Chris and the team seem to have added is a switch to do it all on-line, don't send the taxpayer a letter, send them an email instead. That's fine, as far as it goes.

But that's not what people are going to understand from "it will make self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people" – which is that Chris and the team have just made self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people. They haven't and it's misleading to suggest in any way that they have.

"Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment"? Obviously you weren't going to fall for that inadvertent sleight of hand. But there are MPs out there, and even Cabinet Secretaries, who might. Not to mention impressionable people in Australia and the US.

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Updated 15.4.15

Hat tip Bryan Glick, extract from the The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015 (p.49):

We have already created 20 high-quality digital services, which include apprenticeships applications and tax self-assessments. We will save you time, hassle and money by moving more services online, while actively tackling digital exclusion. We will ensure digital assistance is always available for those who are not online, while rolling out cross-government technology platforms to cut costs and improve productivity – such as GOV.UK.

The "tax self-assessments" facility mentioned there was available in early 2007 and possibly before that.