UK specific: MTD - Making Tax Digital

[Maf. King]

On Monday, 17 April 2017 16:39:02 BST Alain Williams wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 04:00:20PM +0100, David Goodenough wrote:
> > Apparently they have effectively locked out open source software as there
> > is a per application (i.e. there would be one just for GnuCash) "secret"
> > that is used during the OAuth2 login.  Keeping that value secret is not
> > possible in open source (closed source just hard code it into their code)
> > so effectively open source can not be used.
> 
> Do you have a reference for that ?
> 
> With all of the fuss that the UK gov't is making about open source it would
> be interesting to see them justify that.
> 
> How long before someone extracts/dumps-to-the-web the secret for a few
> popular applications like Sage ? Mind you: sage would love it - once the
> secret is invalidated they get to charge everyone who has bought a copy for
> the new version.
> 
> How about a shim for a small binary executable - does its bit and gets out
> of the way ? I know that it is not ideal, but might be a pragmatic
> solution.


Hi Alain,

Not wishing to jump the gun or presume _anything_ about the workings of HMRC, 
but...

A few years ago, they made all employers report the details of each wage 
packet in the few days prior to payment being made (to old way was basically 
down to the employer to do the "right thing" each payday, and keep track and 
finally report at the end of the tax year. It was relatively complex to deal 
with manually, but not overly so for a small business with only a handful of 
employees) 

I believe Sage & QB et al can do all this and submit the relevant monthly 
figures.  However, GC can't.  But HMRC have released a package called Basic 
PAYE Tools (or something like that) which does the calcs for you, and submits 
the data to HMRC in what appears to be simple XML (encrypted for TX, but I 
don't know how well encrypted).  And it does the year-end paperwork (P60) 
too....  

The good news is that 1. PAYE Tools is free (beer, not open source) and 2. 
Available or Mac, Win & Linux (notionally Ubuntu IIRC, but quite happy on 
OpenSuSE in my experience over the last 5 or so years)

I'm not going to assume that Digital Tax will be dealt with in a similar 
fashion - but the precedent exists, at least, which might be some small 
comfort  If employers running only Linux systems are sufficient in number to be 
looked after, I have to hope that the number of individuals who will be 
required to report quarterly must be a greater number...  

Or I figure that even worst case, they'll have a web-form that one can submit 
data with.

0.02 - no inside knowledge!
Maf.