No group affected by the proposed changes to the tax regime is properly prepared: not advisors, not taxpayers – and not even HMRC themselves, says Robyn Milstead.
According to HMRC and leading software providers, the outlook is exclusively positive as the countdown begins for the first mandated Making Tax Digital for Income Tax taxpayers (MTDITSA) in April next year. There’s a strong sense of anticipation and confidence surrounding this milestone – or at least that’s what they’ll tell you.
Over the past year I have attended a number of webinars on the subject of MTDITSA and found myself increasingly irritable at this all-positive approach. As Tax Director of LKA Chartered Accountants, an award-winning, 18-employee firm in Surrey, the more I heard about how MTDITSA would transform MY life as well as “give my clients valuable information that will transform their businesses”, the more I wondered, who is writing this stuff? Of course, the answer is… HMRC and software developers.
Seeing red on a particularly lively webinar one day I decided to reach out to other professionals. So I founded a WhatsApp group specifically to share information on MTDITSA, to include the ability to raise and discuss the challenges we are facing as an industry because of it. The group, named MTD Therapy has more than 300 members. A large number of these are from small or single member companies with simple client bases – voices that were certainly not heard by HMRC on initial consultation.
So, what key issues are being overlooked? I’d like to highlight some of the concerns raised by the group in general – concerns that, I believe, reflect the views of a significant number of accountants, tax advisers and bookkeepers whose voices have, so far, gone largely unheard.
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