Good news, bad news?
July 14, 2017Great news yesterday, with the announcement that Making Tax Digital has been postponed and that only businesses with a turnover over the VAT threshold will have to keep digital records until, well, this government has either gone or has consolidated itself enough to be able to get the legislation through.
This is the best of all possible worlds – or at least it is at first sight. Because of course HMRC needs to have a modern computer system that isn’t held together with string, prayer and for all I know a couple of floppy disks. Of course we should be able to log on and see our tax returns already pre-populated with the information HMRC already knows about us, the stuff from our P60s and bank interest and what have you. MTD is a customer service imperative.
The problem is that the Treasury won’t pay for that kind of thing: it had to be pitched as a project that would pay for itself, and that’s when you get into the ridiculousness of trying to make teeny tiny businesses that keep perfectly adequate paper records move online or perish, in the absurd belief they’ve all got seventeen grand or so stuffed down the back of the sofa.
So keep the good stuff, the modernisation of the online interface, and ditch the bad, the mandation/penalty routine?
I wish. The HMRC annual report and accounts for 2016/17 came out yesterday. I know it’s a couple of hundred pages so I can’t pretend to have done more than skimmed it so far, but for me the key question is this:
do they still get the money?
Does HMRC still get the funding to upgrade its computers to MTD and to do the necessary work on pre-population without the spurious promise of resultant tax gap closure? I can’t tell from the accounts. Did they get MTD funds in 16/17 and will they get the rest in 17/18 and beyond. I can’t tell.
Anyone?
tiintax 
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