As many of you know, the deadline for submitting the employer’s annual tax statement (P8) was 31st July. The annual tax statement (P8) is submitted to the tax office by means of an XML file to the Tax Office portal. Due to the volume of files that the Tax Office processes at this time of year, it can take 2 to 3 weeks before the Tax Office processes the file and reverts on it. On the whole, most companies seem to have submitted their files successfully without issue.
However, we are aware in the last three weeks, there have been a number of companies that have received rejection messages. There are many reasons that this can happen and it is quite common. Unfortunately, if you receive an email saying that your P8 XML file has been rejected, the attached error message does not always indicate what may have happened.
Some companies that submitted the file between Monday, 24th July and Friday, 28th July, have recently received rejection messages with the error “XML file is invalid. Please contact your payroll provider.” Unfortunately, this error message does not indicate the problem. Several of these rejections seemed to be due to a slight update to the accepted XML format for the Tax Office system. We updated EasyPay on the 3rd of August with some additional XML format changes that seemed to help with most of the affected companies.
If you recently received an XML rejection or receive one in the next few weeks, look at the error message. If the error message is “XML file is invalid. Please contact your payroll provider.” and the XML file you submitted was prior to 28th July, then simply regenerate the XML file and resubmit. EasyPay may correct the issue for you automatically.
If, however, you receive the same message after re-submitting your XML file, then let us know, and we can look at it to help identify the problem. The most common reason we have seen, for this message, is that an employer has adjusted tax or social insurance for a mistake made earlier in the year.