UK Making Tax Digital Fiasco & Our New Product Pitch Failure
Freelancers, forget it.
The clear message from UK tax authorities from this week's financial year-starting obligation to lose money for no other reason than pointless bureaucratic over-reach. Branded as its initials, MTD.
The self-employed, already weighed down by onerous reporting of unnecessary compliance, now must submit everything up from the most crumpled receipt for a biro, not at year-end as was but several times a year. Rather than spread any admin burden, red tape will overwhelm.
With added visible costs on top of needless aggravation from having to pay for software to record and file and extra accountancy fees.
Even the government's own watchdog found the scheme costs more that it generates. Also the latest of a long line of tax measures that instead of swelling the Public purse (which anyway ought be reduced) actually ends up bringing in way less.
It won't apprehend evaders. It won't remove friction from this huge cohort of diligent workers. It won't generate growth.
It will discourage endeavour. It will hammer national productivity. It will be an all-round disaster.
It robs the honest strivers of that most valuable resource, time. Resentment has already built to such an extent, a slice of the workforce the country can ill-afford to be without are quitting. Opportunities, jobs, and the country itself.
Broken Britain writ large.
My fury compounded when reading of a politician's rebuffed attempts to thwart this regimen.
Then-MP Craig Mackinlay spent a decade battling this.
A multitude of spurious reasons delivered to dismiss his ever-valid objections.
Sobbing through the litany I realised that when we sell the 'new', we must do better than these. For they all are vacuous. Think of the plain probe, 'why?';
"addressing inaccuracy"
"better [for underlying tasks]"
"easier [for clients]"
"to address the ['money'] gap
"[because] it's modern".
We must be so much deeper than that. Our champions prospect side cannot be prepared to such surface level nonsense alone.
That last one is a real kicker. I've encountered this plenty down the years in our Enterprise space.
'You gotta take it 'cos its the latest'.
End of.
The browbeaten campaigner calls that 'it's modern' shut-down "the most comical".
Yes, I know it can work with a pet customer. But it is not sustainable.
Don't be like the clueless, failing, harming British taxman. Go beyond all these insults to the intelligence, especially the mere 'modern'.