For UK users: Will gnucash get ready for Making Tax Digital ?

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue Jul 25 10:21:53 EDT 2017



> On Jul 25, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Mike Evans <mikee at saxicola.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 21:39:43 -0700
> John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
>>> On Jul 24, 2017, at 4:01 PM, Mike.Minh at gmx.net wrote:
>>> 
>>>  In about a year's time the UK taxman (HMRC) will only allow approved
>>>  accounting software to transmit the transctions required by law to
>>>  HMRC.
>>>  The project is known as Making Tax Digital or  MTD
>>>  No exact details or requirements to softwaremakers have been published,
>>>  but will gnucash commit to MTD?
>>>  If not, gnucash cannot be used anymore by any UK users.
>>> 
>>>  Link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-tax-digital/overview-of-making-tax-digital  
>> 
>> It seems unlikely the we’ll have either the resources (as in developer time) or information from HMRC to implement this. If HMRC actually requires that account software be submitted to them for evaluation and approval  it also seems unlikely that they’d approve any FOSS program. 
>> 
>> That aside the page you cite says April 2019 and only for businesses above the VAT threshold. It looks like HMRC intend that they’ll collect information on individual taxpayers by other means so that individuals will have no reporting requirements at all. Since GnuCash is aimed primarily at individuals and small businesses it seems that most of our UK users will still be able to use GnuCash.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> _______________________________________________
> 
> Interestingly HMRC seem to be encouraging opens source
> 
> https://hmrcdigital.blog.gov.uk/2016/07/14/talking-openly-at-open-source-16/

That talk is about how much HMRC enjoys using software that they don’t have to pay for and how they’ve published some of their web code on GitHub. It doesn’t say anything about them accepting FOSS programs into MTD. 



> On Jul 25, 2017, at 1:43 AM, Mike Evans <mikee at saxicola.co.uk> wrote:
> For those interested in developing.
> 
> https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/api-documentation <https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/api-documentation>


Which has no information on MTD. All of the APIs documented there are for getting information *from* HMRC, not sending them information.

It *does* have information about their authentication system, which uses the fairly standard “server key” or OAuth key. These keys are per-program and completely preclude open-source software because there is no way for an open-source project to distribute them without compromising them.

There’s another problem with “approving” an open-source program: What are you approving and how does an instance prove that it is the approved code, nothing more and nothing less?

Regards,
John Ralls



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