TaxSource Total

Here you can access summary of the key current tax developments in Ireland, the UK and internationally as reported by Chartered Accountants Ireland

The report of key tax developments are displayed per year, per month, by Ireland, the UK or International and by report title

Self-assessment pre-population moves to public beta

In January, HMRC announced that its plans to move self-assessment pre-population into public beta were delayed and thus would not be publicly available for the 2016/17 filing season. HMRC’s Digital Blog has recently announced that the self-assessment pre-population APIs (Application Program Interfaces) has now moved into public beta.

This service pre-populates taxpayers’ self-assessments with certain information. APIs are methods to allow different pieces of software to communicate with each other. In this case, the APIs allow taxpayers and their agents to access HMRC data via third party software, primarily for pre-populating self-assessment returns.

There are six APIs in total which cover the following areas:

  • Individual employments
  • Individual income
  • Individual tax
  • Individual benefits
  • National insurance
  • Marriage allowance

The APIs are “user restricted” – the end user must sign in to their Government Gateway account and grant authority for their software to access their data. If the end user is an agent, they must also have an agent-client relationship in place.