We are delighted to welcome Nick Parker as the new Chair and Stuart Lisle as the Deputy Chair of the Tax Faculty Board. We would like to thank Raj Shah for his chairmanship of the Board over the past two years. Raj remains on the Board and will continue as the Tax Faculty’s representative on ICAEW Council for the next year. In other committee news, Jill Springbett has stood down as Chair of the Practitioner Tax Committee, although she will remain a member. We thank Jill for her wonderful contribution to the committee and her support to the Tax Faculty. We are delighted to announce that Sarah Jenkins, General Practice Partner at Milsted Langdon in Taunton, has taken over as Chair of the committee and we wish her success in the role. 

During the period, we held a round-table meeting with staff from HM Treasury, HMRC and with ICAEW members to discuss the capital allowances consultation, which we followed up with our formal response. We made informal written representations on a range of employment tax and national insurance contributions matters, including completing forms P11D and P46(Car) for electric cars, completing forms P11D and P46(Car) for employees not on payroll, employment allowance and subsidy control, advisory mileage allowance payments, and improvements to the PAYE system.

We continue to engage extensively with HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) team. In addition to attending meetings to discuss specific aspects of the MTD programme, we also met directly with some of the HMRC team involved. Feedback from ICAEW members is that they remain concerned about whether MTD can be delivered successfully in the time, given the number of problem areas that remain to be resolved and the lack of proper testing due to the low numbers in the pilot. 

 HMRC’s service standards continue to be a major concern for ICAEW members. We held a joint discussion with colleagues from the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT), The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, the Association of Taxation Technicians, and the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group to discuss the concerns and the feedback received from our members. We followed up this meeting with a joint letter to HMRC to highlight areas of concern being raised.

During the period, there was an in-person meeting of the Practitioner Tax Committee, hybrid meetings of the Tax Faculty Board and the VAT & Duties Committee and virtual meetings of the Tax Policy and Reputation Committee and the Technical and Oversight Committee. 

The period was a busy one for meetings with HMRC. These included a meeting of the Joint VAT Consultative Committee, the Compliance Reform Forum, Powers and Safeguards Forum and the Penalty Reform Forum, as well as meetings on specific aspects of MTD. 

We held a small round-table meeting with some colleagues from CIOT’s technical and professional standards teams to discuss areas of mutual interest and areas where we might cooperate more closely – areas discussed included service standards, MTD and likely next steps in the raising standards agenda. As part of this closer working, our new staff member Ed Saltmarsh has been invited to attend CIOT’s VAT Committee. We had an informal catch-up with the Tax Director of the Office for Tax Simplification (OTS) to discuss forthcoming plans of the OTS and how ICAEW might support its work. Along with some colleagues from CIOT, we attended a meeting with members of the Welsh Treasury team to discuss feedback and changes made to the Welsh Taxes (Power to Modify) Bill following our previous representation and the giving of oral evidence to the Bill committee in February this year. We were pleased that most of the concerns we raised, including a wide power to impose retrospective taxes, have been addressed in the proposed amendments. 

Anita Monteith and Caroline Miskin presented our latest webinar in our MTDtalk series, and Caroline co-presented a Tax Talk webinar with Rebecca Benneyworth where the main topic was also MTD. Ed Saltmarsh and I presented a talk at two regional events (Southern and Liverpool) where we discussed the potential benefits of Freeports, the latest information on the designation of Freeport tax and customs sites in those regions and what further developments on Freeports are in the pipeline.