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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Sort of, but it's a lot more than that - it's not just digitally - we already do that, and have been able to for a decade or so, through the HMRC tax website.
The change is that they're removing the option to file your taxes directly in this way (through the government's HMRC website) and forcing you to instead buy/subscribe/register with unnecessary commercial software, to allow you to pay your taxes. HMRC have not developed their own software to allow you to do this safely and freely.
Essentially this means you now have to pay extra money, or allow all your personal and financial data to be resused and sold on to 3rd parties, to be allowed to submit a tax return and pay your taxes.
oh right, thanks for that -- hence the need for a FOSS solution
Is this something we can petition the government for, or do we have to develop one ourselves? Is there a spec sheet?
It was originally planned/trialled during the recent Tory era, so a lot of the petitioning etc was back then (and appeared to achieve... not a lot).
It was previously (last few years) just running for larger companies (who likely had accountants or already used advanced, paid accounting & payroll software) - the reason it's an issue now, is they're dropping the threshold on who uses the new system, to include lower-income small businesses, charitable projects, self-employed, sole traders etc - people who traditionally did their own tax returns, and sent them directly to HMRC.
There's still time to petition or write to MPs about how it's being implemented, but there's also the option of writing new software (or modifying existing software).
The spec for how it all works IS available, and has been for a few years.
There's a publicly available API on github and a bit of info scattered about the dotgov website - in theory, it's the bit to tell you how to connect/send this to HMRC from whatever your program is.
www.api.gov.uk/hmrc/
github.com/co-cddo/api-catalogue
github.com/hmrc/mtd-api (I think this is the one for the non-VAT Making Tax Digital, which is what we're looking for)
github.com/hmrc/vat-api (This is, I think, the one for the VAT Making Tax Digital, which is currently being used)
There's likely some more documentation somewhere. What's lacking is showing you what the actual tax returns questions are for those filling in a return.
oh wow this is messy.... I really hope the government shares all the actual required information in good time.
Or someone makes a fake payroll company, gets the info, and then leaks it all over the net