Making Tax Digital for VAT will be one year old on 1 April 2020. That’s also the end of the one-year soft landing period for businesses mandated to use MTD for VAT from 1 April 2019 to ensure that the relevant digital links are in place.

Readers are reminded that HMRC have opened a process available to all businesses which allows them to apply for extra time to meet the MTD digital links requirement once the relevant one-year soft landing period ends (on either 1 April 2020 or 1 October 2020). However, the criteria to do is strict and is set out in section 4.2.1.3 of the updated MTD for VAT notice 700/22. Businesses are urged not to leave applying for more time until the last minute.

In January, HMRC experienced another technical issue which affected some of its digital services, including MTD. As a result, the MTD service was unavailable for a period of time. HMRC advise that a deep dive is being carried out to establish the cause of the outage, the second for MTD in the last few months.