Spud now bemoans the cost of regulation:
HMRC’s claimed logic is that, by imposing this obligation on businesses, with serious penalties soon to be attached for failure to comply, businesses will secure a supposed benefit as a result of them knowing their own real-time accounting performance. This claim by HMRC embraces, with an arrogance that borders on the profoundly presumptuous, the claim that these businesses would not otherwise know how they were doing financially, when, as I well know from my own experience of working with them, a simple range of heuristics is normally enough for most small businesses to be able to completely appreciate the performamce of their businesses.
And let’s not pretend the requirement isn’t extremely onerous.
To almost every small business I’ve worked with, the most important number is the bank balance, which takes a minute to ascertain.
As Alan Sugar famously said: many a profitable business has gone bust because of lack of cash in the bank.
Cash flow…
or in the early days, can we pay the wages at the end of the month?
and when some success comes, can we pay the wages in 3 months time…
We can be thankful that Prof Potato is writing about something which he is very familiar, namely “an arrogance that borders on the profoundly presumptuous”…
But does this post mean that tax collectors, historically the Potato’s heroes in his quest to stop people keeping their own money, have now been added to his ever-growing enemies’ list?
Like I keep saying its a grift. Writing reports about how HMRC needed more funding (coincidentally paid for by the Taxman’s union) was the way of getting cash back in the day, now that they aren’t paying he will say whatever he likes about them. Have gob, will talk sh*t for £££. He’s aimed at the Greens and the SNP at times, hoping for a better standard of grift, at the moment he’s reduced to targeting the Youtube algorithm, that he hopes will send gullible types towards his videos and keep him in toy trains and (judging by his appearance) jam doughnuts.
It would be interesting to see if some wealthy political backer showed up and required some free market type research work how much he’d sell his soul for.
Is he moaning about making tax digital? That will be a pain in the arse. Of course Spud usually insists that any level of state fuckery is both necessary and acceptable for businesses. Amusing that he is bleating now said fuckery affects him.
Sadly there is no chance this will make him reflect that perhaps government is better out of people’s lives.
He’s spotted expressed public concern about an issue and is leaping onto the bandwagon and frantically scrambling to get to the front.
Ah, but in this case it’s affecting him. If he’s making more than what is it £30k a year from YouTube and whatever else, then he’ll be liable for the costs and the inconvenience.
I’m assuming Murphy is having to fill out all these forms himself and finally seeing up close how the state hates small business.
Don’t need no steenking heuristics, gotta spreadsheet. That plus the latest bank statement tells me everything, no need for the HMRC to tell me anything, and no need for me to be rushing around four times a year with a three-week deadline to submit data instead of nine months to get around to doing just a single annual return.
I think this would take a heart of stone not to chuckle quite loudly!!
To be candid, HMRC lied at the time and revealed gross incompetence in their workings. Since then, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has found that Making Tax Digital has not worked for the larger organisations to which it has been applied, because the tax gap has not been closed as a result, and there is no evidence of greater tax compliance as a consequence, whilst significant additional costs have been imposed on the business community.
Hasn’t he got form here? Accusing a public body of being liars probably isn’t the cleverest in the current climate. Particularly if he is pushing that claim on X/ Twitter. The irony is he may actually be correct, but that hasn’t stopped the authorities under this most hideous of administrations pursuing innocent people.
And right now, and utterly bizarrely, whilst Making Tax Digital is being extended to all small traders, it does not apply to partnerships. LLPS and to all small limited companies, where the real tax evasion problems in the UK economy are.
It is as if HMRC are deliberately pursuing a policy that they know cannot work by picking on the most vulnerable targets in the world of self-employment, represented by those who are usually struggling to get by in a world that provides them with little other chance of doing so, while deliberately avoiding challenging the real issues in tax collection in the UK.
Small sole traders threaten the plans of the Great Reset and the Great Replacement. Many back Reform. There’s a logic here – just not one that would normally bother him. Indeed I’d think they might be either ‘Far right’ or ‘Neoliberal’ in every case. As Marius and others point out he’s seeing chickens coming home to roost and it isn’t sitting well with him.
As it is, HMRC have forgotten Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s maxim. Making Tax Digital will be the disaster I always suggested it would be. People will be driven into the shadow economy as a consequence, real risk will remain unappraised, and all that whilst the take of feathers will probably not increase, but the scale of hissing will most probably increase considerably.
If you had set out to destroy trust between a tax system and taxpayers, Making Tax Digital might have been the best way to do it. Asking the impossible and deliberately sanctioning vast numbers of people for failing to comply is not the way to create tax compliance; it is the way to destroy it. Is that what HMRC want? And what is the political agenda in play here? Very few are asking that, and the answers are quite unappealing. If you want to destroy the state, first you destroy its ability to tax.
Of course, it’s those ‘Far righters’ entrenched across the UK Public sector – not the Anti-semites and the legions of woke people who believe in 1300 genders and all the other bullshit who are responsible for this debacle. Self-reflection seems beyond him.
“making Tax Digital will be the disaster I always suggested it would be.”
since approximately 4:30 yesterday when I noticed people talking about it.
Too much information. Businesses can’t react real-time, so such information can only be destructive.
20 years ago, a VP of Coca-Cola in Atlanta bragged to me that with SAP, he could get real-time production data of 20 oz units in China. I looked at at him and asked, “What can you do with that information?” Micromanage. From afar.
In the factory I worked in 50 years ago, the production scheduler was forbidden from coming in the building.
Wonder if the self-employed production company son of his is going through a hard time dealing with HMRC busybodies, and quite correctly taking the side of the son.
Likewise when son can’t get a house or some affordable night life.
Yes, it does seem odd that he’s coming close to being right.
I bet that’s it. It’s a problem if it affects him. If it affects other people it’s great.
Does his son have to take his tax and accounting advice?
There are many reasons to oppose “Making Tax Digital” – mine is the incompetence of the HMRC Computer Programmers – so Murphy may be on the right side of the argument (difficult though that may be to believe).
MTD will be hugely inconvenient for me, but I’ll adapt, I suppose. But if the motherf@c#ers come for my log-burner, I’ll riot…
Rest assured a ban is coming – of that you can be certain!!
I don’t disagree John on this occasion – making tax digital
Is likely to be a disaster but it’s of a piece with excessive state control. We need lower taxes and a smaller state – both concepts to which he is fanatically opposed
Lower taxes and *simpler* taxes