This week's opinion

HMRC’s technical note  Making Tax Digital: changing the scope and pace shows how far things have moved on since MTD was mooted. Gone are all thoughts of sole traders scanning receipts into an app in real time by 2018 with everybody in the system by 2020. Instead only VAT businesses above the threshold will have any sort of quarterly obligation before 2020. Business records will have to be kept digitally by this population but the approach to digital record-keeping has changed markedly. As I read the draft regulations I saw no requirement to keep a contemporaneous digital record of each transaction – merely that a digital record exists by the time the quarterly report is due.

The costs of MTD were always controversial. At the beginning the impression was given that businesses would benefit but the latest figures show the net cost to business will be nearly £300m...