All new technology has teething troubles, and the new Making Tax Digital system is unlikely to be an exception. We have transferred all our clients and have successfully submitted on time and verified all the Value Added Tax returns that were due by 7th August 2019, which is the first big date for MTD.

Verification is an issue. From experience with corporation tax, we know that just because we have a receipt from both the software and the Revenue, that still does not mean that our client won’t be bothered by spurious fines and other demands. What we have done is to set up someone else’s software on another computer and then download the VAT returns to check them, and we will make a habit of doing this for the next few months at least. It is actually possible to have more than one software installation communicating with the Revenue as long as they are all authorised to do so, but we will only use one installation for submitting returns to avoid chaos.

The Revenue should have provided a free read-only viewer, or an online view, or some other means of checking submissions independently of third-party software. They do this for corporation tax and income tax, but not for VAT. What a dreadful system this MTD is !