Making Tax Difficult

KEY POINTS

• Making Tax Digital will create more work and expense for small companies.
• Taxpayers and advisers will have to check pre-populated returns.
• Additional cost of upgrading systems and hardware to cope with MTD.
• Accuracy is unlikely to be improved by MTD.

In the aftermath of HMRC’s six consultations on Making Tax Digital (MTD) readers are making their objections known. These make for interesting and sometimes gloomy reading. There are so many practitioners on whom small and micro-businesses – for most of whom let’s face it tax may as well be in ancient Greek – depend to submit their tax information and pay the correct tax that it seems extraordinary that wholesale change in the way they work is being foisted on them. It must also be remembered that...