Big Brother HMRC Wants To Know More About You

Seemingly ‘under the radar’, HMRC published a consultation on 20^th July 2022 entitled “Improving the data HMRC collects from its customers”.  In short, HMRC wants to know a lot more about you, your occupation, your working patterns, self employment and owner/manager dividends.  We wonder why? 

On the gov.uk website, HMRC suggests it has identified six areas where data collection needs to be improved:

• The business sector of the self-employed.
• The occupations of both employees and the self-employed.
• The location of an employment or a business.
• The hours employees work.
• Dividends paid to shareholders in owner managed businesses.  
• The start and end dates of self-employment.

The paper also suggests and is looking for feedback on how collecting this additional data could be implemented.

Comment

Could it be to find more ways to tax people that actually get up everyday and work?  Surely not.   We suggest HMRC already gets much of this information via Real Time Information (RTI) reporting for employees via payroll returns each month as well as self assessment information for both the self-employed and owner/manager shareholders (dividends) as well as limited company accounts.

HMRC already has Making Tax Digital (MTD) in place for limited companies both VAT and non-VAT registered to report each quarter as well as annual reports and accounts.  MTD also comes into force for the self employed in April 2024.  Perhaps HMRC should simply cross reference data that it already collects rather than forcing us all to duplicate the same with even more ‘red tape’.