The season of goodwill?
Traditionally the Christmas period is regarded as the season of goodwill, though not if you're HMRC it would seem.
In his Autumn Statement George Osborne announced new digital tax reporting (see here ) for the majority of small business owners.
Given that the Government is proposing to invest £1.3 billion to ‘transform’ HMRC (their words not ours), you can guarantee they’ll want a return on their investment.
In an earlier blog which you can read about here, we’d expressed cynicism about Government and HMRC plans to bring tax reporting into the 21st Century.
These plans to make all the self-employed report to HMRC on a quarterly basis (don’t many VAT registered businesses do this already?) are proving to be deeply unpopular with many small business owners.
The key issues appear to be the extra time and cost involved for small business owners. This, together with the fact that many small business owners may not be making the best use of technology, will hamper their ability to cope with the this extra level of compliance.
These proposals for digital reporting, along with the new dividend tax, reduction of tax credits and the costs of the minimum wage increases, certainly don’t add up to a happy new year for many small business owners.
In fact an online petition against digital reporting has been started here. Whilst we’re not necessarily recommending you add your name to the list, you might be interested to know that once this petition reaches 100,000 signatures it must be considered for debate in the House of Commons.
You might consider this to be a more direct and immediate way of registering your disapproval rather than via your representative of the local chamber, Federation of Small Businesses or Institute of Directors.
As small business owners ourselves, we like to make the best use of modern technology to enhance the services we provide our clients. We also actively encourage our clients to use modern technology as we know this helps ensure their business runs like clockwork.
We’ll therefore reserve judgement on these proposals as we’re confident that we’ll be able to help our clients cope with the ever increasing demands that HMRC seeks to impose on them - digital or otherwise..
If you’d like to discover how we could make your life easier why not get in touch with [email protected]. Or you can simply give us a call on 01202 048696 (just because we use modern technology doesn’t mean we’re not real people!).