Hi
If you have followed my 'Tales of Taxfolk' in the past you may have been wondering what HMRC has been up to and how many cock-ups they have made over the Summer.
Reassuringly they continue to shoot themselves in both feet quite regularly whilst pretending in public that nothing is
wrong; those of us who speak with their front line agents quite regularly know differently.
First of all Making tax Digital (MTD) has been put off and watered down, at least for now. It'll come back in a couple of years at which time I'll update you again. Everything else at the moment is just noise.
Of more interest, you may recall that I told you back in April that HMRC's online tax calculation software doesn't work properly for certain taxpayers with more than one source of income - HMRC call them 'exclusions' - and you'll have to file your tax return on paper instead of online.
But over the summer they've deployed the best and the brightest software engineers to
fix the problem and update the software which now....still doesn't work, and will continue not to work for the remainder of this tax year.
Tax advisers, like us, who are busy at this time of year filing returns have experienced more joy this week as the online software has been intermittently not available at all or crashing regularly. A kind recording on the HMRC Agent helpline says
that they are working to fix the problem....hopefully more quickly than they are getting the software to work.
While this causes a certain amount of amusement, on a serious note, laughable as it may be that the 5th largest economy in the world cannot tax it citizens correctly, HMRC is hugely under-resourced, determined to hound entrepreneurial business owners (who it spuriously suspects of
under-declaring the amount of tax they owe) and continues to try to cut tax agents out of the tripartite arrangement that has persisted for years, quite successfully, between the taxing authority, agents and taxpayers.
Business owners don't want to deal with their own tax affairs any more than the want to - or should - do their own bookkeeping. Their time is far too valuable creating wealth for
their businesses and the economy.
It is about time that ministers and civil servants - few of whom have ever run a proper business - understood that it is not helpful to put more burden rather than less on to the business owners who pay them.
Noel
Guilford
Noel Guilford is the principal of Guilford Accounting a small business accountancy practice specialising in advising owner-managed businesses on current accounting, finance, and tax matters. You can reach him via email at noel@guilfordaccounting.co.uk or by phone at 01244 660866. He is the author of the 'Figure it out - an entrepreneurs guide to understanding your business numbers' which you can obtain by visiting http://guilfordaccounting.co.uk. His latest book, How to Build a Successful
Business' will be published in 2017.