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The tone of financial secretary Jesse Norman’s recent speech to the ICAEW at its annual conference (tinyurl.com/jnicaewavc) was notable for two reasons. The first was the acknowledgement that the way HMRC has coped with the coronavirus crisis has given it a new confidence that it will be able to cope with the challenges which will be thrown at it in the months and years to come. The word resilience had a prominence that I do not recall hearing in previous speeches.
The other was what seemed a more genuinely open approach to how making tax digital (MTD) might develop in the future. Many of us, though supportive of the principle, became frustrated with the mixed messaging from HMRC about the project’s underlying aims and what appeared to be a lack of willingness to engage with the profession and taxpayers in a meaningful way about how the programme would be developed. The new timescales give us more scope to work properly through what a digital-first approach to tax administration could look like and the advantages it might bring to taxpayers, agents and HMRC alike.
Let’s make that aspiration a key part of the next phase of the programme.
