This week's opinion

Any residual hopes some people may have had for a further postponement or even abandonment of Making Tax Digital have surely disappeared with the publication of the stakeholder communication pack and other material on 18 October. MTD is going to happen. In the short term it will only be a shadow of what was originally proposed. Had everything gone ahead as planned our clients would now be digitally scanning receipts in real time and making quarterly returns for income tax. MTD for income tax will not be introduced until at least 2020 and even that date is starting to seem extremely optimistic.

It would however be a mistake for those not involved in VAT compliance to do nothing. Some form of digital record-keeping requirement for income tax will be part of MTD (the regulations are already published in draft) and to that extent...