Press release: Government must bear the costs if businesses are obliged to change their record keeping and profit reporting, says tax body

The appeal is made in ATT’s response1 to the HMRC consultation Bringing business tax into the digital age.² In its response, the ATT emphasises that if digital record keeping and quarterly profit reporting are made mandatory from April 2018 as HMRC propose, there will be many businesses without any significant experience of keeping digital data secure who will be forced down an unfamiliar path, making them very vulnerable to cyber-crime, as well as being hit with new costs.

The ATT has also reacted to a letter to the Financial Times newspaper today (10) by Jim Harra, HMRC’s Director General of Customer Strategy and Tax Design. In the letter Harra recognises that MTD would involve significant change for some businesses and gives an assurance that HMRC is looking at the provision of additional assistance with transitional costs.

Yvette Nunn, Co-chair of ATT’s Technical Steering Group, said:

“There are real practical concerns about the security risks and the potential for businesses becoming victims of cyber-crime. If taxpayers who are running businesses have to use their phones or laptops to keep details of all their business transactions, there is a major risk of data being accessed maliciously. Our experience suggests that many businesses are not sufficiently cyber-savvy. They are unprepared for having to keep their data safe in a digital world.

“Forcing people down the digital route when they are unprepared for it could be putting them at the highest risk of being targeted by cyber-crime and fraud. We believe that if HMRC is taking away the element of choice from a taxpayer over how they keep their business records and whether they engage digitally with HMRC, it needs to take the primary responsibility for educating taxpayers on cyber security.”

On the wider question of what assistance businesses may require in order to meet the proposed obligations, Yvette Nunn said:

“As the Government is driving the move to mandatory digital record keeping, it must be prepared to invest whatever amount of financial support is required to ensure that taxpayers can reasonably meet those obligations. It is important to appreciate that very many taxpayers are fully meeting their tax obligations with the use of manual record keeping systems. For them, the compulsory change to digital record keeping offers no advantage.

“If quarterly digital reporting were not being introduced on a mandatory basis then there might be the possibility of having a discussion about a reasonable level of financial support. However, where it is effectively being forced upon everyone, we don’t think there is a reasonable level. It will take whatever it needs to take to get everyone on-board and if the Government is unable to invest to that extent then it really does need to rethink the mandatory aspect of the MTD proposals.”

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Notes for editors

1. The HMRC consultation closed on 7 November. The consultation document can be found here. HMRC’s consultation has asked what level of financial support it might be reasonable for the Government to provide towards investing in new IT, software or training and at whom this support should be aimed (see Question 4 on page 14 of the HMRC consultation).