How making tax digital affects you

We now know more about the taxman’s plans for making tax digital. Ian Tongue outlines how this will affect independent practitioners.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is determined to embrace digital technology and use this to increase tax revenues. It calls this measure ‘making tax digital’ or MTD for short.

It believes it loses around £8bn in tax revenues from inaccurate tax returns that the current tax inquiry system could never address.

MTD is therefore designed to force taxpayers into having more robust accounting records and systems and to report to HMRC more frequently, thereby increasing accuracy. Well, in theory at least.