HMRC Update: Fix a Rejected Information Return by 1 September to Keep Your Original Submission Date

If your company has had an information return rejected by HMRC recently due to a validation error, there's a practical deadline worth knowing about: fix and resubmit it by 1 September 2026, and HMRC will treat your original submission date as the effective one — rather than the later date you actually got it right.

What's changed

HMRC updated its guidance on what happens when a company's information return fails HMRC's validation checks and is rejected. Previously, the practical effect of a rejection could leave some uncertainty about which date counted for compliance purposes — the date of the original, failed attempt, or the date of the eventual, corrected resubmission. HMRC has now clarified that if a company resubmits its return so that it passes validation on or before 1 September 2026, HMRC will use the date it received the first (failed) information return as the effective submission date, rather than the later resubmission date.

This matters because submission deadlines tie into potential late-filing penalties and interest calculations. A business that submitted on time, but whose return happened to fail an automated validation check, shouldn't be penalised as though it filed late through no fault of the underlying timing — this update effectively closes that gap, provided the correction happens by the 1 September cut-off.

Why this is surfacing now

This guidance sits alongside a wider set of teething issues HMRC has acknowledged with the ongoing rollout of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. The same ICAEW briefing notes HMRC is aware of "a very small number of customers whose quarterly obligations were not created during sign-up," with corrective action expected to have been completed by the end of July 2026, and separate advice for taxpayers electing to use calendar quarters to wait until HMRC's systems have reflected that election before submitting updates. Together, these point to a system still bedding in as more businesses are brought into digital reporting.

Checklist for affected businesses

• If your company or agent has received a rejection notice for an information return in recent weeks, don't leave it — resubmit as soon as the underlying error is fixed.
• Confirm the resubmission passes HMRC's validation checks before the 1 September 2026 deadline to preserve your original submission date.
• If you're unsure whether a return was rejected, check directly with your accountant or agent, since rejection notices can sometimes be missed if they arrive via automated system messages rather than post.
• If you've recently made a calendar-quarter election under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, hold off submitting your next quarterly update until you can confirm the election has been reflected in HMRC's system.
• Keep a dated record of both your original submission attempt and your corrected resubmission, in case you need to demonstrate timing to HMRC later.

Who this affects

This guidance is aimed squarely at businesses and their agents/accountants dealing with company information returns — it's a compliance-process detail rather than a change to tax rates or thresholds, but it's exactly the kind of administrative deadline that's easy to miss and costly to ignore if a penalty is wrongly applied.

How this compares internationally

Rejected-filing grace periods of this kind aren't unique to the UK. The US IRS operates a "perfection period" for certain electronically filed returns that are rejected — typically giving filers a short window (often five to ten days) to correct and resubmit while still being treated as filed on the original date, a similar underlying principle to HMRC's approach here, albeit with a much tighter window than the several-week period HMRC has allowed.

Key Numbers

• Resubmission deadline to preserve original date: 1 September 2026
• MTD for Income Tax quarterly submission deadlines: 7 August, November, February and May

Sources

• Tax news in brief 5 August 2026 — ICAEW
• Self-Employed in the UK: How to Register, Pay Tax and Stay Compliant in 2026 — Kletta
• IRS — electronic filing perfection period

Educational content only — not financial advice.