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Tax-geared news of the sort that we think you might want to know about is quite thin on the ground this week. It's 'the calm before the storm', as 'L-day' (Legislation Day) is on the 18th July. This is the day when the government will unfurl (in the digital sense) the new draft finance bill for 2023. In the meantime, we have been updating our website and devising new tax workshops for you. 

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Keeping up with your tax compliance obligations can seem akin to trying to learn to drive a high-speed bulldozer. While it's relatively easy to get started, steering in the right direction can be tricky and you are likely to crash if you take your eye off the road!

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We are focusing on tax and interest costs this week, we have another HMRC Agent update and HMRC is taking down several key services for essential IT migration this weekend. Mysteriously, many other services are also down over the period, which by co-incidence coincides with the Glastonbury festival weekend.

HMRC have announced downtime in their online systems for PAYE and National Insurance between Friday 23 June and Monday 26 June 2023. Many other online and telephone HMRC services will also be affected.

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HMRC needs to have a re-think to find ways to simplify their Making Tax Digital (MTD) project in order to avoid vast future cost overruns. A National Audit Office (NAO) report this week shows that HMRC is currently 400% over budget. As far as throwing money into a vast 'black hole', few thought that anything could beat the IT disaster that was the COVID-19 Track n' Trace app. I hope that this is a wake-up call for all concerned. The MTD project now needs to be reviewed and aptly refined to ensure that it keeps up with technological change, delivers value for money and creates a significant improvement in tax reporting.