The government has accepted five of the ten core recommendations in the OTS’s report on administrative matters causing complexity for small businesses and will look further at the eighteen additional recommendations made in the report.
The OTS’s report, Simplifying everyday tax for smaller businesses, published in May 2019, made recommendations for simplifying administrative matters facing businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover below £2m.
The financial secretary to the Treasury has responded to the report in a letter dated 5 November, setting out the government’s response to each of the ten core recommendations.
The Treasury has marked the following recommendations as ‘accepted’:
HMRC is to prioritise its strategic focus on the PAYE system and RTI;
a senior HMRC official has been appointed to oversee and provide leadership on the agent strategy;
this official will make sure the role and needs of agents are understood and incorporated into development of new systems;
HMRC will continue to map small business journeys across tax regimes so that in time all major journeys will be covered; and
HMRC will align and streamline payment processes across different taxes.
Those marked to ‘consider’ are:
continuing work to ‘find the optimum way’ to improve start-up guidance available to small businesses;
HMRC working with the OTS to consider the best time for a fresh review of PAYE;
HMRC exploring with Companies House ways to make the return process simpler for businesses;
simplification of the online CT return process before implementing any future extension of MTD to corporation tax; and
ways to mitigate the burden of having to file two CT returns for initial accounts covering more than 12 months, without creating problems for the wider CT system.
The letter thanks the OTS for its ‘valuable insight into improving the tax environment in which small businesses operate’.
The government has accepted five of the ten core recommendations in the OTS’s report on administrative matters causing complexity for small businesses and will look further at the eighteen additional recommendations made in the report.
The OTS’s report, Simplifying everyday tax for smaller businesses, published in May 2019, made recommendations for simplifying administrative matters facing businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover below £2m.
The financial secretary to the Treasury has responded to the report in a letter dated 5 November, setting out the government’s response to each of the ten core recommendations.
The Treasury has marked the following recommendations as ‘accepted’:
HMRC is to prioritise its strategic focus on the PAYE system and RTI;
a senior HMRC official has been appointed to oversee and provide leadership on the agent strategy;
this official will make sure the role and needs of agents are understood and incorporated into development of new systems;
HMRC will continue to map small business journeys across tax regimes so that in time all major journeys will be covered; and
HMRC will align and streamline payment processes across different taxes.
Those marked to ‘consider’ are:
continuing work to ‘find the optimum way’ to improve start-up guidance available to small businesses;
HMRC working with the OTS to consider the best time for a fresh review of PAYE;
HMRC exploring with Companies House ways to make the return process simpler for businesses;
simplification of the online CT return process before implementing any future extension of MTD to corporation tax; and
ways to mitigate the burden of having to file two CT returns for initial accounts covering more than 12 months, without creating problems for the wider CT system.
The letter thanks the OTS for its ‘valuable insight into improving the tax environment in which small businesses operate’.
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