Opportunities for taxpayers of making tax digital and technology

With the first mandation date now less than a year away making tax digital (MTD) for income tax is dominating the digitalisation headlines. It is not however the only digital initiative on HMRC’s agenda. In this article I want to pick out some themes from three recent conferences: one organised by Wilton Park on digitalisation and tax simplification; the 20 years of HMRC conference convened by CIOT and ICAEW; and most recently the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Oxford conference ‘How do we build a business tax system for the 21st century?’. I also want to look at a couple of recent consultation documents.

Making tax digital

The original ambition was to reduce errors by using software to keep business records closer to real time. I never had an argument with the idea that keeping records closer to real time would be likely to improve their...