This page lists all currently known issues and temporary workarounds if they’re available.

General

HMRC service issues

HMRC current service status along with planned downtime is available here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/customs-declaration-service-service-availability-and-issues.

Unhandled exception

This occurs when the system hasn’t yet been authenticated with HMRC (or the authentication token has expired) and one of the necessary Microsoft components are not installed on your system.

 

This is usually installed automatically by our installer however some anti virus / threat systems may block the installation. In this case install Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime manually from the following link https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#download-section - be sure to run as administrator.

Open

Bond becomes stuck during HMRC submission

Only after just entering your HMRC gateway credentials, if Bond appears to become stuck showing “Please wait while communicating with CDS service” for a prolonged period of time while attempting to submit declarations then this could mean that the gateway credentials you’ve used do not have access to the CDS service, close Bond and retry with a different HMRC gateway account (you’ll likely need to force close the application when this occurs).

Declarations not clearing

If declarations appear to get stuck (not progress to ‘Cleared’ status) this can mean one of a few things:

1. HMRC have not finished with the submission request yet so haven’t issued a response - wait a reasonable timeframe for a response (most would clear within a day of being submitted) and if you’ve still not one then contact customs providing them with the UCR Ref ID shown against the shipment.

2. Bond may have missed a response message (only seen in Bond versions earlier than v5.6.9).

3. Customs may have routed the declaration down the control route and may require a copy of the invoice showing the stock values. It’s come to light that one of HMRC’s developer specification documents is missing vital information about pull notification response messages which could potentially be returned to Bond, two specific messages in fact which act as an instruction from HMRC for a copy of the invoice to be provided to them in order for the declaration to be cleared. At this stage it’s unclear whether any customers would’ve received one of these messages however due to some declarations appearing stuck in some systems it would appear likely. Contact the customs clearance team via email nch@hmrc.gov.uk and provide a copy of the invoice. A future version of Bond will make it clear to users if customs have routed a declaration down this route, until then this will have to be handled manually between users and customs clearance team.

Communicating with HMRC | Querying CDS may assist in force clearing these, however customs should be contacted for advice if this is not the case.

Rejections