Thousands of Landlords and Sole Traders have still not signed up for Making Tax Digital

Thousands of Landlords and Sole Traders have still not signed up for Making Tax Digital

With less than 60 days to go before the first quarterly filing date for wave one of Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax, over 400,000 taxpayers have not even registered!

Only 336,000 of the first wave of MTD for Income Tax taxpayers have signed up for the new system, with the 7 August deadline for the first quarterly filing looms, confirmed the director of MTD at HMRC, leaving thousands of taxpayers delaying the task.

This means a staggering 61% of the total MTD first cohort of 864,000 landlords, self-employed and sole traders – 528,000 taxpayers – have not signed up.

Although HMRC is not running a penalty scheme in the first year of operation so taxpayers will not be financially sanctioned initially for failure to sign up, this will only be a temporary hiatus.

However, this will be put to the test in less than 60 days’ time, as on 7 August the deadline to send the first quarterly update will arrive.

HMRC’s last update in May stated there were 303,000 signups, meaning in under a month there were over 33,000 registrations. However, even if this rate of registration keeps up, nearly half a million taxpayers will need to take action.

Here at Kennedys Accounting we are ready to help if you need to sign up for MTD and you are not sure what to do. Give us a call and one of our team will be pleased to talk you through the requirements.