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Should be noted that Schedule 1 and 2 have retrospective effect (even though HMRC claim, semantically, that it's not retrospective law).
Hopefully Treasury Select and Public Accounts committees will bear this in mind as retrospection is meant to be used only in exceptional circumstances?
Hitherto hefty Finance Bills by Chancellors who clearly weren't up to the job, but needed to try and demonstrate otherwise, served to open the floodgates for abuse by greater intelligentsia.
Who knows , subsequent enacted bills might solve the legal avoidance effectively created by dumb predecessors.
Good to see no 'new' tax. Hammond has at least understood the adage of 'one step forward ; two steps backward'.
Oh yay, another set of penalties, this time for Making Tax Difficult.
MTD by regulation- what could possibly go wrong.....
Can't wait to try and explain why everyone's fees have to go up so that HMRC can have 4 or 6 filings a year when there is only the need for one.
It seems that the Finance Bill (No.2) 2017 (enacted on the 16th November 2017) includes basic, but wide ranging, regulations that enable the Government to progress with MTD with a liberal splattering of 'may do this" and "may do that" in the text.
Instead of the hundreds of pages included in the original draft of the Finance Bill 2017, which was later stripped out just before Parliament was dissolved for the General Election, we now have more basic enabling legislation in both the Finance Bill (No. 2) 2017 and the latest budget proposals. As Rebecca says, much of the detail of the format and operation of MTD will not be included in Primary Legislation. This also goes for the way in which penalties will be operated.
Of more interest to some of us is the introduction of MTD for VAT which seems to be nothing less than full MTD for businesses at or above the VAT threshold. Note that this does pave the way for reducing the 'VAT Threshold' after the current two year fix which probably means that eventually the thresholds will be lowered to bring more businesses into VAT and MTD.
With regard to the plan to bring in MTD for VAT in April 2019, the Government may still be under the false impression that this will be easy for those businesses affected to deal with. In my experience, smaller businesses will still struggle to comply, especially when there will be only a year from the completion of consultation to the proposed operation of MTD for VAT.
I would be very surprised if it is made compulsory to operate MTD for VAT from April 2019 and see this rather as a voluntary arrangement. I don't think any Government in its right mind would introduce this massive change to the administration of VAT at the same time as we are dealing with Brexit and changes in the way that VAT is operated throughout Europe as well. I doubt if HMRC would be up to speed on all of this anyway and I am hugely sceptical about the ability of software developers being able to include every single aspect of all these changes in software that is ready to go in April 2019.
The logical way, as it has always been with MTD, is to stage its introduction over a long time based on software, resources and training that has been tried and tested and proven to work. The legislation in the Finance Bills will enable the Government to take this approach and I feel sure that they will think carefully about this before making any final decisions.
For more information on MTD for VAT -
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/making-tax-digital-reforms-a...