this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Making Tax Digital, Free and Open
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This is a new place for discussing the UK government's Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative. In particular how we as a community can continue to file our taxes freely in terms of both:
- Avoiding high fees and vendor lock-in to commercial software
- Maintaining user freedoms with free and open source software
We are starting some 'wiki' posts that will answer the main questions and be continually updated from your comments:
Disclaimer: we are not experts and cannot guarantee accuracy here. Always seek your own financial advice.
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Welcome! The idea for this community came from a Mastodon post:
https://floss.social/@IanTwenty/114868391122043853
...and the forthcoming changes to how UK individuals and business will have to file their taxes, i.e. Making Tax Digital (MTD).
For some these changes may mean they are compelled to subscribe to a commercial software package and/or change their ways of working considerably. For some small businesses the cost of accounting software and services may be their largest expense.
My fear is that the MTD changes mean there can never be a free and open source alternative to managing personal and business finances in the UK. I hope I'm wrong.
Through this community it would be great to share and discuss:
- The changes that are coming in the UK government's Making Tax Digital initiative, both for individuals and businesses.
- How to keep filing taxes without having to subscribe to expensive accounting software.
- How to maintain our freedom when filing and paying taxes - freedom over what software you run and what it does with your personal/company data.
- I am very interested in the possibility of starting a free/open source project that could be compliant with the MTD requirements that we all might use - OR discovering and supporting such a project if it already exists.
- Lessons from other countries that have been/are going through a similar transition. I understand parts of MTD may be addressing an EU-wide effort to address fraud.
Please check out our sidebar which will be updated with important posts and links.
We are hosted on feddit.uk, a UK-centric Lemmy instance so thanks to them for having us. They have a code of conduct, please abide by that (see What are the rules here? in their homepage sidebar).
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The only free-to-use, no registration, no spam software I'm aware of currently, is the "100PcVatFreeBridge" www.comsci.co.uk/100PcVatFreeBridge for VAT tax returns (which are already using an early version of the MTD software). I don't think it's open source itself, but they are a supporter of open source projects. I'm hoping they'll be doing a non-VAT version. Basically you set up a spreadsheet/CSV file in a particular way, and it converts and uploads it.
As for the lack of being able to submit your tax return directly to HMRC, as everyone has for decades, and the lack of government-organised open source submission software, there is still a bit of time to ask your local MP to raise this in Parliament. Here's our government's own guidance on how and why you should always be using open source software for things which are publicly funded www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source. It would be a reasonable question why they're ignoring their own advice and instead suggesting that you ferry your personal and financial details to random (possibly criminal) companies in America to submit your tax return.
Thanks for this info, very useful!