“Digital Support for Business & Agents – Agent Team March Update for VCG

Talking Points

• February was another very busy month for Talking Points. 14 digital meetings were delivered.
• 4 of these opportunities were for agents who are helping their clients prepare for Making Tax Digital for Business. They were very heavily subscribed, with over 4000 participations in these live meetings being recorded. As a result, 2 additional opportunities were arranged for 6 March and a future programme of webinars is being explored.
• We worked with the Head of Industry Liaison at the Pensions Regulator to deliver an update on automatic enrolment duties and this meeting alone saw over 700 agents take part.
• Looking ahead to late March:
  • New deemed domicile provisions and the tax impact: A high level overview of deemed domicile provisions and the impact of the new reforms for Income Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax. Also a high level overview of cleansing of mixed funds and Capital Gains Tax rebasing. Trust protections will not be covered, but will be included in the Talking Points meeting scheduled for 22^nd March as follows:
  • Non-domiciles, offshore trusts – the new regime: A high level look at the changes to the anti-avoidance provisions for non-resident trusts and the impact on non-domiciled and deemed domiciled individuals.
  • Protecting businesses from intellectual property (IP) crime and infringement: This presentation will cover how businesses can protect their IP (trade marks, copyright, etc.). It will highlight various aspects of IP crime, to help businesses keep counterfeits out of their supply chain, avoid the risks posed by using unlicensed software and ensure they aren’t inadvertently selling illicit streaming devices.
• Our forward-look schedule, publicising Talking Points already arranged to take place during the coming weeks, is available on Gov.uk.
• We continue to welcome suggestions for future subject matter and will accommodate such meetings in the programme where we can.

Agent Toolkits

• Agent Toolkit take up volumes are expected achieve target for 2017/18. These products aside from providing detailed technical guidance via existing links on GOV.UK, also highlight common errors from previous filing programmes, alerting Agents with a view to minimising the same errors re-occurring. Agent Toolkits continue to undergo a ‘refresh’ programme to update their content in accordance with current compliance practices and taxpayer obligations. The existing product portfolio has expanded to cover subjects hitherto not considered, following customer insight findings and research. Work continues to be undertaken to evaluate the merits of migrating Toolkits onto a new digital platform, to make them more user friendly to use.

Agent Forum (AF)

• As at mid-March 2018 the Forum has 383 Agent subscribers, up 93 since the last progress report. And 129 HMRC staff, up 196 since last briefing. We continue seeking key stakeholder engagement to both use the Forum and recruit more Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for provision of issue resolution responses. It has attracted nearly 28k views (up 2.4k), 1710 (up +163) posted messages on 293 (37+) current topics; which are moderated daily with appropriate responses given, as determined by subject matter, related traffic generated and referrals provided by line of business.
• Our priority continues to be enlisting formal SME engagements and focusing on recruiting more agents to register for and use the forum. A programme of promotion emails commenced during February 2018. Registration return rates are running at approx. 10 percent of agents emailed.
• We continue to work closely with the Issues Overview Group (IOG), made up of Professional Bodies (PBs), a number of whom also sit on the VCG and HMRC representatives. It jointly determines what the ‘widespread’ issues priority classification should be, for earliest resolution. New arrangements for these meetings are in place and have moved away from a fixed schedule of events throughout the year to bespoke ones. Focus will be on subjects of most concern, at which relevant SMEs will attend to both hear first hand how Agents are impacted and to offer up or take away issues for resolution. A second meeting is scheduled for 12 March covering P800 and related issues.
• The Digital Support for Businesses and Agents (DSBA) Agent Team, staffed by 2.5 FTE Issues Resolution Managers (IRMs), moderate and run the forum. As and when required we bring in extra cover from our Agent Account Managers (AAMs) team to ensure we maintain response service levels, when going to Lines of Business for issues resolution.”

END OF HMRC UPDATE