Our practice has recently signed up for the agent services account (ASA) pilot, and therefor our old goverment gateway is redundant for filing VAT returns.
We have been able to create our account, and link it to our old gateway so that our current clients are transferred over. This seemed to work fine (Although there is no way to view a list of our clients on the new ASA).
We now need to file a number of VAT returns that have a deadline for the end of the month however, we cannot do this until the new account is up and running!
After watching the HMRC/Quickbooks webinar it appeared that we needed to authorise each VAT client individually through the ASA, and they would receive a link to their email address to confirm this. This then sent our clients a link where they had to create their own HMRC logon. This was not the case in the webinar which is why i presume that I have gone wrong somewhere along the line.
I have already made the relevant changes to our software (sage) to update the details to the new gateway and authorise for MTD submissions.
Each place i look for help I get told different things. Primarily I need a solution to file VAT returns for my clients as we have 9 working days till the end of the month.
Any help, advice or guidance will be greatly appreciated as this whole pilot seems a bit of a misleading mess! Many thanks in advance.
Replies (12)
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I have no help for you unfortunately but I am just grateful that I have never used my new ASA account.
It seems as if there will be hundreds of people in your situation so that should help on the appeals side.
The old gateway should still be open until you join the pilot scheme for each individual client (sign up on gov.uk per HMRC Talking Points webinar). I've opened my Agent Services Account but I still use my old gateway to file VAT returns as I haven't joined the pilot scheme for any of my clients.
Yes that is the case however as I have joined the Pilot scheme i'm under the impression that this stops the facility to use the old gateway?
Fortunately, that is not the case. You won't be able to file returns for the clients that you have individually registered for MTD, but the gateway remains usable as an agent, and will do so indefinitely.
Once MTD is mandatory, our practice will still be using the gateway for all those under £85,000 turnover, around 1/3 of all our VAT clients, if what you had said was true, this wouldn't be possible.
I think the trouble is the tech is moving quicker than the guidance so no-one has a flipping clue what they are doing.
I haven't been brave enough to even pilot one, let alone move the lot across.
What I can tell you is the main thing is to ensure your clients pay on time, so manual payments if you cant get filed and the DD's don't get activated.
Quite frankly id just print out a comp and post it to the dozy XXXers myself if you cant get it working. Stop wasting your time!
It is entirely possible that you have not yet signed your clients up to the pilot scheme.
It is difficult to say from what you have written.
As I understand it (although I tend to deal directly with VAT registered legal entities rather than through an ASA) merely signing a client up to your ASA does not result in them joining the pilot scheme. Although I understand the MTD APIs inside out I am not yet fully up to speed with the ASA.
What I do know is that it is possible to authorise a client through OAuth without them being in the pilot scheme. That is the thing you did through the Sage software.
There are APIs that enable checking the status of clients with various "scopes", but I don't know who other than me has written user facing routines for these.
It is logical that each individual client would have to be signed up to the pilot scheme individually even if it is done by an agent.
That is because the mere fact that a client is a client of an agent does not necessarily require that they join MTD.
When people get access to the Agents API MTD software then they will have that sort of information.
https://github.com/hmrc/agent-authorisation-api
The API also allows the agent to check the status of authorisations already requested and query active or inactive relationships.