Technology and the future of the tax profession

Last November I delivered the ICAEW Tax Faculty’s annual Hardman lecture. In it I looked at some of the challenges and opportunities technology presents to the tax profession. This article is largely based on what I said.

And before readers think ‘this is just going to be more about MTD’ don’t worry it isn’t and those three letters will appear only once more after this paragraph. The impact of technology on the way we do tax will extend way beyond MTD. It is this wider context that I want to explore.

The toolbox

Earlier last year I wrote a report for Tolley The Tax Technology Horizon (www.tolley.co.uk/taxhorizons) which looked at some of the tools in the tax technology toolbox. We use them every day whether we deal with nano-businesses or multinational enterprises. Optical character recognition (OCR) robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial...