Making Tax Digital is under a year away, yet we have learned today that there is a flaw in HMRC’s self-assessment software for 2016/17 affecting the dividend and savings allowance introduced in April 2016.
This means that anyone submitting a self-assessment return online could be faced with an incorrect calculation of tax, until such time as HMRC sort out the problem.
HMRC say that affected taxpayers should submit a paper tax return so that they do not overpay tax and returns filed after 31 October should include a “reasonable excuse” claim.
Given that Making Tax Digital is expected to digitise the entire tax system for individual taxpayers it’s staggering that HMRC have not even managed to correctly digitise one change in the tax system and expect taxpayers to revert to the manual submission of paper returns to make sure tax is calculated correctly.
I’m worried.
