This week's opinion

I make no excuse for returning to Making Tax Digital. It is of such importance to our work and we are keen to help keep readers fully informed about what it will mean – at least to the extent that this is possible while so many issues are still to be resolved.

Understandably much of the attention has been on digital record-keeping and quarterly updates. But there is a host of other aspects of MTD that need to be considered and I will use my next few columns to discuss these.

The first is the legal framework under which MTD will work. The machinery of the taxes acts relies fundamentally on the tax return – from notices to file through to time limits for submissions enquiry windows and discovery. How will these concepts translate into a regime when there are no longer tax returns and there will be...