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HMRC Online opens Business Tax Dashboard

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22nd Apr 2012
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A new Business Tax Dashboard was added to HMRC’s website during the time it was offline for maintenance over Easter.

The march towards online filing in recent years has mainly been about taxpayers and their advisers feeding electronic information into HMRC. The new dashboard means that we’re beginning to see more information coming back. Accountants already have access to client lists and summary report through HMRC’s adviser pages. The Business Tax Dashboard brings together information about each business from the different online tax portals and was designed to cater for the department’s smaller business “customers”.

“HMRC's Business Tax Dashboard will give you an overall picture of your tax position including payments you have made and amounts you still owe. You will be able to see either Corporation Tax or Self Assessment information, depending on the type of business you have. You can also view information on VAT and PAYE for employers, if you have set up your business for these online services,” the department advises on its website.

The information provided includes the amounts of tax owed, and the status of payments and penalties. The dashboard can also be used to amend contact details, including an email address. However, that's as far as any interaction goes. There is no facility to reallocate payments or overpayments between taxes or periods, which would have made the BTD much more useful, but which perhaps betrays the lack of real integration behind the apparently unified Dashboard view. Joined up government may be too much to expect, but surely a joined up tax system is not asking too much is it?

Despite this being a new service, it includes a decent amount of historical data:

  • Corporation Tax: accounting periods from 1 October 1993 onwards
  • Self Assessment: tax year 1996-97 onwards
  • PAYE for employers: 2010-11 onwards
  • VAT: the current and 15 previous months.

The dashboards will be updated each weekend to reflect returns and payments that reached HMRC systems in the previous five days.

To use the dashboard, businesses will need to enroll for HMRC Online Services and then for either Corporation Tax or Self Assessment. Where they already use online services they need to ensure that they all use the same login, or merge the various accounts into one. This is potentially a holdup for many organisations which use an agent for their main tax filing and only use the online services for transactional taxes such as PAYE and VAT.

Frustratingly there is are no immediate plans to roll out dashboards to agents, the workaround being to ask clients to add you as a user on their account with administrator access - which is going to be rather cumbersome if you have a lot of clients and therefore a lot of different user IDs and passwords to remember. Agents can still view their client’s tax position for Corporation Tax and Self Assessment using the relevant online service, HMRC said, simply adding that it is looking to provide an agent dashboard, and access to client PAYE and VAT tax information "at a later date".

Nigel Harris will be taking the Business Tax Dashboard for a test drive once we can find an organisation registered for the new service and will add further details here shortly. The rather misleading link to an online demo on the new Setting up and using a Business Tax Dashboard page is actually a link to the old HMRC Online Services demo page rather than a demo of the new Business Tax Dashboard, but as soon as we can find a business set up to use the new service we'll add some suitably anonymised screenshots to this article to show you what it looks like!

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By User deleted
20th Apr 2012 23:44

Typical HMRC stupidity ...

... any clients with the savvy to use the dashboard will have an agent, and they will expect their agent to see the dashboard, and probably have no interest in seeing it themselves, which is why they pay an agent - doh!

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By Ken Howard
21st Apr 2012 11:36

Are HMRC for real?

There will be VERY few business owners who will use this dashboard.  It will be the smallest (who have no need and can't afford an accountant) and the largest (who employ an in-house accountant) who will use this new system.  The vast majority falling in the middle will be using accountants for the likes of corporation tax or self assessment, so that side of things is pointless.  OK, maybe useful for VAT and PAYE, but how hard is it to log in separately for these rather than seeing them both on the same "dashboard"?

Where is the functionality for accountants?  Bad enough that accountant's can't use the dashboard - I think it would be highly useful to be able to see my client's tax position at a glance.  But why not more VAT and PAYE functionality for accountants anyway?  As I understand it, the client's dashboard will show current account status for VAT and PAYE, but the accountant's login still won't show this information.  Why not?  The information must be there for it to be available for the client, so why not visible to the accountant?  What have HMRC got to hide?

Perhaps that's the plan.  They deliberately exclude accountants so that relatively few businesses will use it, so that minimises HMRC embarrassment if it doesn't work properly.  Then when they eventually get it working properly, they'll roll it out properly to larger numbers of users.  What a stupid plan.  Accountants would quickly find the glitches and are in the best position to offer improvement suggestions.  They'd have been better rolling it out as a trial to selected accountants or in selected areas only.  

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Replying to Glennzy:
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By Nigel Hughes
26th Apr 2012 11:08

I may be paranoid but....

Ken Howard wrote:

Perhaps that's the plan.  They deliberately exclude accountants so that relatively few businesses will use it, so that minimises HMRC embarrassment if it doesn't work properly.  Then when they eventually get it working properly, they'll roll it out properly to larger numbers of users.  What a stupid plan.  Accountants would quickly find the glitches and are in the best position to offer improvement suggestions.  They'd have been better rolling it out as a trial to selected accountants or in selected areas only.  

 

I don't think this is the plan - they'll make it work sooner or later, and I imagine their hide is pretty thick by now as they have a bit of experience of cruising through IT glitches.

If clients get used to using it for themselves, it may wean them off using agents, which will probably mean clients end up paying too much tax without realising it, and may never know that the modest fees from their accountant represented good value for money.

With iXBRL having the same potential for accounts filing and BIS telling everyone that accounts are just a bureaucratic waste of time, these are pretty tricky times for accountants.

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By LizWilliams
23rd Apr 2012 14:04

Yet more exclusion of agents

Not only does the dashboard exclude agents but the new CT41G is not a form but a letter which requires companies to register with HMRC Online Services to deal with.  Most clients do not understand when they have started to trade and certainly expect their agents to sort this sort of thing out for them.  Apparently the company can send the information in a letter signed by an officer instead.  What on earth was wrong with the original form CT41G?  Answers on a postcard please....

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David Ross
By davidross
23rd Apr 2012 22:40

I agree

There is a pressing need for for us agents to be able to see transactional information about VAT and PAYE. Interesting and not surprising that it is available (as it is for CT and SA) but bloody frustrating that they did not think to let us see it.

Remember, HMRC gets arsy if you ask for a list of PAYE payments (I have submitted a Data Protection Act request for more than one client - no reply after months to that!)

This stinks

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By rockallj
27th Apr 2012 12:45

Available to agents from autumn 2012

I attended an HMRC WT meeting yesterday. It seems that HMRC intend to have the dashboard rolled out to agents by autumn 2012, so watch this space.

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Replying to TomHerbert:
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By Rowland
18th Aug 2014 16:03

Now August 2014 and still waiting

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By ireallyshouldknowthisbut
02nd May 2012 16:41

Having a proper view of PAYE and VAT will be a big improvement -  I dont know how many calls are made to those departments to confirm details what ought to be available.

Not really fussed about having it all on one screen or going by tax.

HOWEVER, the big question will be, will be actually be allowed to see it given the complete mess the agent authorisation for VAT is....

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