In a bid to slash print and postage costs by £50m and drag HMRC communications into the 21st century, letters will no longer be sent out automatically to taxpayers from next spring. Email alerts will be sent to them, notifying them of new documents in their personal tax accounts or the HMRC app instead.
As part of HMRC’s ambitious digital by default programme, which envisages 90% of HMRC interactions with taxpayers being online or digital only by 2029-30 tax year, the Budget papers confirmed a major shift to digital by default had been signed off by the government, which is starting sooner than expected.
This means that the days of posted brown letters from HMRC are very much numbered with only the ‘digitally excluded’ or those who actively opt out of digital still able to receive old school posted letters, starting in spring 2026.
In one sense this might be an improvement, given that snail mail comms with HMRC seems to take a year or so. However, those who are not digitally savvy may well face problems with this new high tech vision of HMRC's.
In June I warned of the bureaucratic nightmare that HMRC's rush to digital will unleash.
HMRC’s MTD is a self-inflicted wound on the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit, and taxpayers are the ones left bleeding.
Various guides to Making Tax Digital can be found here.
HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"
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