Draft legislation for Finance Bill 2023

I have covered enough fiscal events in my time to know that it takes a few hours before I am able to stand back and get an overall sense of the announcements. That was certainly my experience on legislation day.

My initial impression was that this was just a disparate set of tidying up measures and consultation responses without any underlying theme. But coming back to various documents after a coffee break it struck me that there was indeed a strong underlying theme: data.

HMRC data gathering

This was most clear in a document which I had rather overlooked the first time round: Improving the data HMRC collects from its customers.

I had assumed that this was going to be a fairly innocuous document about official statistics but in fact it has proposals which could have a significant administrative impact on many taxpayers and their agents....