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Have you considered how you will adapt your practice working routines to cope with the advent of MTD for Income Tax and then Corporation Tax?

Even though, as we learned last week, MTD ITSA has been deferred until April 2024, instead of an annual SA filing cycle, come 2024-25, there will be five filing cycles each year and they will all fall on the same dates each quarter.

Obviously, the imperative to have all affected clients’ record keeping in an approved electronic format will help, but firms that process client’s data – offer a bookkeeping solution – will need to keep up-to-date. Imagine the pressure at each quarter-end reporting deadline date…

We will then have two years, until April 2026, to add partnerships into the MTD ITSA mix before incorporated businesses are obliged to join the MTD club.

This will be a formidable change for practitioners. In its way, more challenging than the advent of Self-Assessment way back in the 1990s; the last significant change in UK tax reporting.

The profession needs to use the extra year to good effect. At the very least, firms should be searching their client lists to root out small business owners and landlords that still record business transactions manually (or on rudimentary spreadsheets) and support them adopting approved electronic software solutions. 

The profession may seem to have plenty of time to adapt to MTD, but the clock is ticking.

Source: New feed