The deadlines extension announced by the regulator, as exclusively reported in Mortgage Introducer last month, have been generally regarded as a welcome move. But an industry source has since contacted MI with increasing concerns over the time it is taking to submit the returns online and the re-occurring problems caused by the FSA’s website.
He explained that while the decision by the regulator to leng-then the deadlines was a sign of its awareness to the situation, the main problems were technical difficulties experienced when navigating the website and the increasing frustration of being unable to access systems and online forms.
He said: “There has been a grumbling of discontent in this area and a growing number of firms are becoming increasingly frustrated at the time involved in submitting these forms online. We all recognise how important the process is but I, and others, urge the FSA to sort out the online facilities otherwise we could see deadlines being pushed back even further.”
Paul Robinson, managing director of Solent Mortgage Services, said: “We managed to get our returns in on time but I have to say it was somewhat of a struggle. It took us far, far longer than we had imagined because of the lack of functionability of the website. We are lucky because we have a large, experienced team behind us but even then it was a bit of a nightmare. My thoughts go out to one-man-bands and smaller firms.”
Sam Bennett, spokesperson at the FSA, said: ‘I can only reaffirm that while there have been teething problems with the online system, we are working hard to resolve any issues to enable firms to submit their returns on time.”
